An adaptive routine mechanism for ad-hoc wireless sensor networks

An adaptive routing mechanism is described that generates routing paths dynamically for a network of ad hoc wireless sensor nodes. The mechanism enables sensor nodes to minimize route cost by varying their transmission range, and by experimenting with the neighbours from which they forward data. Three route cost functions were compared. The route cost function that sums the link costs was found to give the worst performance, both in the proportion of packets delivered and the standard deviation of packet origins.