RUGGED: routing on fingerprint gradients in sensor networks

Every physical event produces a fingerprint in the environment which results a natural information gradient in the proximity of the phenomenon. Moreover, many physical phenomena follow diffusion laws. We propose a novel scheme to effectively exploit the natural information gradient to route a query in a sensor network. Our scheme uses multiple path exploration, and controls the instantiation of paths by simulated annealing. Unlike other information-driven protocols, our scheme eliminates the overhead of preparing and maintaining the gradient information repository. We apply our scheme to study three different problems: (1) single-value query, (2) global maxima search, and (3) multiple events detection. Simulation results have demonstrated that the routing protocol, based on our proposed scheme, is highly energy efficient and achieves over 98% success rate to route around sensor holes, even in the presence of environmental noise and malfunctioning sensor nodes. We also illustrate that our scheme is well suited for a broad-range of applications; e.g., time gradient based target tracking.