A self-organizing routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are designed to collect and process sensory data from environments. Some environments are dangerous or un-reachable to human beings and it is difficult to replace sensor nodes when they are out of battery or even destroyed, i.e. wireless sensor nodes are in general prone to failure. This kind of characteristics require WSN to detect whether or not its next destination is still available (alive) and to maintain a transferring path if the next destination in the route does not exist (dead). In the normal state, nodes are in power-saving 'sleep' state. When a route is created for some purpose, all nodes in this route will be active and be ready to respond requests from its neighbors. Our approach is to maintain the routing table up-to-date by sending message from a last node to its next node and judging whether the next node is alive according to the response. If problems happen, node will self-organize and try to maintain transferring.