RTBC: A Simple CNS-like Routing Protocol for Target Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks have become a very hot research area, and are going to find lots of applications in ubiquitous monitoring and information collecting. Routing in wireless sensor networks is an important problem. It is also very different from that in traditional wireless networks. In this paper, a new CNS-like routing protocol, RTBC (random time-choosing based clustering routing protocol), is proposed for mobile targets detection in wireless sensor networks. In RTBC, a random time-choosing based CH select algorithm is introduced. It is a new distributed algorithm, with the ability of dynamically forming clusters on-demand for reactive sensor networks. It requires only one local broadcast for CH select and intra-cluster communication schedule. We then compare RTBC with ideal CNS, which is the theoretical optimal routing scheme for our system model, in terms of communication energy costs, and find that RTBC introduces a quite small overhead. Thus, it is very energy-efficient