The adaptive social hierarchy: a self organizing network based on naturally occurring structures

Wireless networks can be used for relaying information acquired by mobile animal borne tags. To date, no research has considered the large amount of diversity presented by the animal kingdom which impacts the design of the network. We consider here how the weight of the animal affects the size of the tag, and hence the energy that it can carry. We use a common structure in Nature, the social dominance hierarchy, and form a similar hierarchy based on energy. Nodes adjust their perceived rankings through continual tournaments using simple, locally applied rules to result in a stable and adaptive structure. We show that the number of levels in the hierarchy controls traffic density and consequently energy usage. To further conserve energy of low ranked nodes, we propose a simple cross-layer protocol. We show through simulation that our power-aware protocol outperforms those with no knowledge of energy.