Self-configuring wireless sensor networks are a fascinating emerging technology: the vision is to spread out hundreds or thousands of small, cheap, battery-driven, and self-configuring nodes bearing a wireless modem to accomplish a given task jointly An important concern is the network lifetime: as nodes run out of power the connectivity decreases and the network can finally be partitioned and become dysfunctional. In this paper we present the BWRC PicoRadio approach to wireless sensor networking. Furthermore we introduce the general concept of altruistic nodes and apply this to the routing protocol of the PicoRadio (the energy aware routing protocol, EAR). The concept of altruists is a lightweight approach for exploiting differences in the nodes capabilities. We show, that the altruist approach can achieve significant gains in terms of network lifetime over the already lifetime-optimized EAR protocol of PicoRadio.
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