Connectivity-Aware Neighborhood Management Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Neighborhood relations are changing over time in wireless sensor networks due to different hardware or environmental effects. These effects and memory limitations require a balanced neighborhood management to ensure agility, stability, symmetry, and connectivity. The proposed neighborhood management protocol Mahalle is optimized with regard to these four criteria. Agility and stability are achieved by ALE, a new adaptive link estimator. Many applications or algorithms for wireless sensor networks depend on a priori knowledge of neighborhood information. This encompasses information about neighborhood relations, i.e., which nodes can communicate with each other, and information about the link quality and reliability between those nodes.