A robust and energy efficient global gradient setup mechanism for gradient based routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Gradient based routing protocols are a major part of the research in protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks. The actual performance of these protocols in real scenarios is dependent on the efficient setup and maintenance of the global gradient. The dasiacost-fieldpsila is one such global gradient. The network wide cost-field allows the nodes to communicate with the sink without maintaining specific routing information or global/local node identification. All the converge-cast communication in the network follows this cost-field implicitly with least routing overhead. In this paper we propose a new energy efficient and dynamic solution to cost-based global gradient setup for gradient based routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. Our proposed mechanism extends previous work in and develops a more dynamic solution. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism is energy efficient as it requires only one broadcast per node to establish the cost field and is also robust to changing network conditions.