Altruists in the PicoRadio Sensor Network

Andreas Willig, Rahul Shah, Jan Rabaey, Adam Wolisz

International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS) 2002.

Abstract:

Sensor networks are a fascinating new technology, the idea is to spread out hundreds or thousands of small, cheap, battery-driven, and self-configuring nodes to accomplish a given task jointly. An important concern is the network lifetime: as node run out of power, the connectivity decreases and the network can finally split. In this paper we present the BWRC- PicoRadio approach to sensor networking and investigate the idea of having altruistic nodes within this context. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of altruistic nodes and apply this to the routing protocol of the PicoRadio, the energy aware routing protocol, EAR. The concept of altruists is a lightweight approach for exploiting differences in the nodes capabilities. We show that the altruist approach achieves significant gains over the already lifetime-optimized EAR protocol of PicoRadio.