Segment and organize irregular shaped Sensor Networks by importing a virtual scalar field

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are closely associated with the embedded environment. The topological relationship in the network has great influence on efficiency. However, many protocols designed for WSN in literature implicitly ignore the possible obstacles or holes often found in real deployment. A defective performance is often observed when these protocols are applied in complex field without pre-treatment. Thus an algorithm is extremely needed for dividing the irregular shaped sensor field into regular ones. Enlightened by the theory of thermodynamics, we propose an algorithm that separates the field into simple pieces such that existing protocols are used efficiently and flexibly. In this paper, our distributed algorithm only needs connectivity information to segment the geometric region despite of knowing the location of the sensors. Evaluations were taken in low density, imperfect boundary recognition, and various geometric regions.