Altruists in the PicoRadio sensor network

Self-configuring wireless sensor networks are a fascinating emerging technology: the vision is to spread out hundreds or thousands of small, cheap, battery-driven, and self-configuring nodes bearing a wireless modem to accomplish a given task jointly. An important concern is network lifetime: as nodes run out of power the connectivity decreases and the network can finally be partitioned and become dysfunctional. In this paper we present the BWRC PicoRadio approach to wireless sensor networking. Furthermore, we introduce the general concept of altruistic nodes and apply this to the routing protocol of PicoRadio (the energy aware routing protocol, EAR). The concept of altruists is a lightweight approach for exploiting differences in node capabilities. We show that the altruist approach can achieve significant gains in terms of network lifetime over the already lifetime-optimized EAR protocol of PicoRadio.