Keynote Speech 2: Routing Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) will witness a huge growth in the near future and both the academia and industry have commenced intensive research. Routing protocol design in WSN is one of the most important areas of active research due to the open issues and its importance. WSNs usually contain a large number of nodes typically with highly correlated collected data. These networks can be categorized according to the network structure and their protocol operations. Network structure based categorization of WSN can be flat or hierarchical. In flat networks, all the nodes in the networks take the same responsibility, while in hierarchical networks the cluster-heads perform several special functions such as maintaining the clusters and aggregation. To support large-scale wireless sensor network management and local data aggregation, hierarchical routing techniques can be regarded as superior to flat routing approaches. Low power consumption as well as smart way of distributing the load is crucial to the routing protocol design in order to attain elongated WSN lifetime. We have already proposed a distributed routing algorithm; optimized forwarding by fuzzy inference systems (OFFIS) for the flat networks, where the decision is based on the distance power and link uses. In addition, we have proposed a two-layer OFFIS (2L-OFFIS) for environmental data collection in cluster-based sensor networks. In this talk, major routing protocols for the WSNs will be presented and the results will be compared with those that are achievable by the OFFIS and 2L-OFFIS techniques. Simulation results show that the network lifetime can be significantly elongated by utilizing the new protocol in hierarchical sensor networks.