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Bottleneck Recognition by Virtual Temperature Field in Wireless Sensor Networks
De Gu, Chunyue Song NG, and Zhihuan Song

The underlying geometric feature of a sensor field greatly affects the overall performance of a wireless sensor network, especially when the field is complex in shape. Obstacles or holes make many existing protocols suffer from the narrow bottlenecks. So, it is very desirable to have a generic algorithm to recognize the bottleneck sections as a high order geometric feature in the irregular shaped field. In this paper, we propose a distributed and location-unaware algorithm enlightened by an observation of heat conduction to identify the bottlenecks in the field. The robustness and consistency of our algorithm are also tested in harsh configuration of low density in deployment and imperfect boundary recognition.

Keywords: Wireless sensor networks, virtual temperature field, bottleneck recognition

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