Automatic registration for dynamic and reconfigurable sensor networks

Sensors have a constrained lifetime for various reasons such as limited battery power, malfunctioning components, or deactivation due to natural incidents. Therefore, there is a continuous need to deploy new sensors or to change the current topology of the sensors to ensure the functionality of the network. In this paper, we study on-demand communication mechanisms between smart and reconfigurable sensors. We present an automatic registration protocol for publish/subscribe wireless sensor deployments which allows a sensor to register with neighboring sensors upon activation, creates a schedule online without any initial global knowledge of the topology, limits the amount of transmissions made by a sensor, and permits modification to subscription patterns. Our simulation results suggest that our protocol significantly decreases the energy consumption while providing a competitive scheduling in comparison to the offline greedy vertex-coloring algorithm.