An Energy Efficient Path Finding Query Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In many applications, the query mechanism would co-exist with the data collection at the same time. If these two mechanisms can be combined, the query could utilize some information from the data collection and get benefits on the robustness and stability. We propose a query mechanism which can find the path without any additional beacons or packets and get information from the process of data collection. This query mechanism is very suitable to the situations that command messages need to be sent to some specific nodes. The proposed protocol is evaluated on TOSSIM and MATLAB, where CTP protocol is used as the data collection framework. The result shows that this query protocol can give approximately the same delivery ratio as that of CTP in the process of transmitting command packets.