Path Metric-based Navigation Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are generally deployed in a desired area to monitor environmental parameters or to detect some specific events. WSNs are also applied to the applications of safety navigation. According to the gathered environmental information, a sensor node can guide users to an exit along the safest path. In previous work, the studies on the safety navigation issue are all focused on the detection of individual events. The objective of this work is to propose a path metric-based navigation protocol for WSNs. Each node detects and measures the metric of a target event, and then search for the safest path based on the proposed protocol. The search for the safest path is based on the path metric, defined as the sum of the measured metrics of all nodes in a path, and the path with the minimum path metric is chosen as the safest path. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is base on distributed algorithms in order to minimize the system complexity and to avoid the need of a central controller. 1