Power Save Protocol Using Chain Based Routing

Sensor networks are deployed in numerous military and civil applications, such as remote target detection, weather monitoring, weather forecast, natural resource exploration and disaster management. Despite having many potential applications, wireless sensor networks still face a number of challenges due to their particular characteristics that other wireless networks, like cellular networks or mobile ad hoc networks do not have. The most difficult challenge of the design of wireless sensor networks is the limited energy resource of the battery of the sensors. This limited resource restricts the operational time that wireless sensor networks can function in their applications. Routing protocols play a major part in the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks because data communication dissipates most of the energy resource of the networks. In many situations, a base station only needs a summary of the gathered information. For example, the base station might only require the maximum temperature of all sub-regions, each covered by a sensor or the average temperature of all sensors in the network. For similar types of application, data aggregation can be applied at all sensor nodes before the data is forwarded to the base station. The above discussions imply a new family of protocols called chain-based protocols. In the protocols, all sensor nodes sense and gather data in an energy efficient manner by cooperating with their closest neighbors. The gathering process can be done until an elected node calculates the final data and sends the data to the base station.