Loop-based topology maintenance and route discovery for wireless sensor networks

Clustering is an effective topology maintenance technology to provide better scalability for WSN. When loop structures are deployed to clustering, it can provide better robustness and convenient routing, because the topology information can be disseminated within a loop instead of a single clusterhead and the nature of the loop that there are two paths between each pair of nodes within a loop provides backup routes. In this paper, we propose a loop-based approach to combine clustering and routing for cost saving, which consists of setup procedure, regular procedure and recovery procedure. For the setup procedure, we propose a loop discovery algorithm, which is a fully distributed, on-demand and configurable algorithm achieving route discovery and clustering at the same time. The algorithm prefers a low-mobility network which is typically suitable for wireless sensor networks