A distributed protocol for cooperation among different wireless sensor networks

An important issue in the design of a wireless sensor network (WSN) is to devise techniques to make efficient use of its energy, and thus, extend its lifetime. When two or more WSNs are deployed in the same place and their sensors cooperate with the other networks, they may improve their operability, by extending its lifetime by trading routing favors or increasing the data entropy by a common data aggregation. Despite being obvious and simple, this idea brings with it many implications that hinder cooperation between the networks. Whereas a WSN has a rational and selfish character, it will only cooperate with another WSN if this provides services that justify the cooperation. The goal of this work is to present the Virtual Cooperation Bond (VCB) protocol, that is a distributed protocol that makes different WSNs to cooperate, enabling cooperation if, and only if, all the different WSNs benefit with the cooperation. In the simulation results, we consider WSNs with different configurations and we show that the proposed protocol enables cooperation solely when the cooperation is beneficial to both networks, and in this case, it saves their energies and extends their lifetimes.