Managing wireless sensor networks with supply chain strategy

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are appealing in obtaining fine-granular observations about the physical world. Due to the fact that WSNs are composed of a large number of low-cost but energy-constrained sensor nodes, along with the notorious timer-varying and error-prone natures of wireless links, scalable, robust, and energy-efficient data disseminating techniques are requisite for the emerging WSN applications such as environment monitoring and surveillance. In this paper we examine this emerging field from a view of supply chain management and propose a hybrid data dissemination framework for WSNs. In particular, we conceptually partition a whole sensor field into several functional regions based on the supply chain management methodology, and apply different routing schemes to different regions in order to provide better performance in terms of reliability and energy usage. For this purpose, we also propose a novel zone flooding scheme, essentially a combination of geometric routing and flooding techniques. Our hybrid data dissemination framework features low overhead, high reliability, good scalability and flexibility, and preferable energy efficiency. Detailed simulation studies are carried out to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme. © 2004 IEEE.