DPEGASIS: Distributed PEGASIS for chain construction by the nodes in the network or in a zone without having global network topology information

In the energy constrained environment of wireless sensor networks, energy efficiency is of prime concern. PEGASIS is a centralized energy efficient routing protocol that has been proposed in the literature. We present a distributed PEGASIS (DPEGASIS) that not only organizes the nodes in a chain form but is also suitable for large networks. DPEGASIS can also be used with other recently proposed PEGASIS based protocols that divide the network in some sectors or slices and then form a PEGASIS chain in each of the sectors. DPEGASIS can be used to automatically construct a chain in a distributed manner in each of these sectors/slices. If these sectors/slices change dynamically during network operation then DPEGASIS can be used to automatically reconstruct the chain in each slice/sector.