A Lightweight Skeleton Construction Algorithm for Self-Organizing Sensor Networks

Although, current technology enables an inexpensive massive production of sensors, it raises numerous challenges on the protocols needed to interact with these sensors efficiently. Several techniques have been proposed to address each of these challenges individually (i.e. localization, clustering, routing, aggregation ... etc). Instead of solving each of these problems individually facing the same common challenges with each problem, we propose to construct what we call a network skeleton that is constructed immediately after network deployment and provides a topology that makes the network more tractable. The skeleton provides sensors with coarse localization information that enables them to associate their sensory data with the geographic location in which the data was measured. Moreover, it promotes a geographic routing scheme that simplifies data communication across the network through skeleton sensors. By hypothetically tiling the deployment area using identical hexagons, the construction algorithm clusters sensors based on their locations into hexagons. Skeleton sensors are chosen to be the closest sensors to the centers of these hexagons. Simulation results show that the accuracy of the proposed protocol to establish the skeleton is sufficient to make the approach applicable for most WSN applications.