Towards an immunity-based approach for preserving energy of data-gathering processes in wireless sensor network nvironments

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consists of large number of sensor nodes with limited energy and computing resources. These facts have highlighted open problem to prolong the lifetime of sensor nodes while still maintaining the functional roles of WSN in reporting important events to a base station. These papers propose an approach for WSN inspired by the concept of immunity-based system where a set of reactions is performed in the appearance of nonself substances called syndromes. The notion of reactive cluster is introduced where only sensor nodes affected by the syndrome appearances need to perform reactions by establishing clusters among them. Since communication costs significant energy, each sensor nodes as an immune cell need to reduce impacts of the syndromes for itself and other sensor nodes in the routing paths to the sink node. It is done establishing adaptive data aggregation strategies. Depend on the critical level of the corresponding syndrome and error of wireless communications that may occur, the length of the aggregation window is adjusted. We show that the proposed approach shows promising results in minimizing dead sensor nodes, avoiding network congestion while still maintaining the functional roles of WSN in reporting important events to the sink node.