An integrated approach for density control and routing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are characterized by having scarce resources. The usual way of designing network functions is to consider them isolatedly, a strategy which may not guarantee the correct and efficient operation of WSNs. For this reason, in this paper we propose an integrated design of network functions. We take two important WSN functions - density control and routing - as an example and present two approaches to integrate them. In particular, we present two solutions, named RDC-sync and RDC-integrated, which integrate a geographical density control algorithm with tree routing. The simulations experiments performed prove that the integrated design improves the network performance, especially when density control and routing are fully integrated