All Roads Lead to Rome: Data Highways for Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

The design of efficient routing algorithms is an important issue in dense ad hoc wireless networks. Previous work has shown that benefits can be achieved through the creation of a set of data “highways” that carry packets across the network, from source(s) to sink(s). Current approaches to the design of these highways however require a–priori knowledge of the global network topology, with consequent communications burden and scalability issues, particularly with regard to reconfiguration after node failures. In this paper we describe an approach to generating these data highways through a distributed reaction-diffusion model that uses localised convolution with activation-inhibition filters. The result is the distributed emergence of data highways that can be tuned to provide appropriate highway separation and connection to data sinks. We present the underlying models and the algorithms for generating the highways, as well as preliminary simulation results.