Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are resource-constrained because of the difficulty of recharging the devices. In order to prolong the network lifetime, the nodes relaying packets should carefully be selected. In a scenario where multiple sinks (gateways) are available, this selection is extended to decide to which sink the sources should send their data. We propose a distributed algorithm in which the the path to the sink is dynamically decided using an anycast transmission scheme. In these schemes, multiple candidates are available to retransmit the frames. They determine their own goodness of being the next hop for every online transmission. The estimation is supported by a fuzzy-logic based system which takes into account the connectivity of the source, the connectivity of the candidate and the candidate's residual energy. The simulation results show that our proposal reduces the energy consumption of the wireless network and the end-to-end delay of the transmissions.