| Technological advances make the existence of extremely large wireless sensor networks (WSNET) with multiple sensing capabilities a reality to be considered. Such networks may be deployed incrementally by potentially different owners, with no single addressing system guarantees. Moreover, multiple small tasks, each requiring a fraction of the network's resources, may be presented to the whole WSNET. Likewise, larger, unforeseen applications may be tasked to multiple smaller networks that had been deployed for different goals. It is thus essential that the underlying routing mechanism be selective enough to propagate data only to relevant parts of the network, and adaptive enough to offer services that can conciliate different addressing needs and meets different application level communication requirements.;It is shown in this dissertation that an attribute based routing scheme meets the demands above. A hierarchy of clusters is overlaid on the network, based on a set of attributes that reflect containment and adjacency relationships. Sensors with the same attribute value are clustered together and elect a leader (the attribute based router) within the cluster. These routers use cluster member information to route data to relevant regions in the network. Different hierarchies may be overlaid simultaneously, allowing multiple addressing schemes to coexist. Furthermore, packets are forwarded based on a set of routing rules. These routing rules are specified based on the cluster hierarchy and present different traversal modes, resulting in different performance levels that can be used to meet different application level communication needs.;The specification of attribute hierarchies, data structures for routing, algorithms for cluster formation and maintenance, as well as routing rules sets for tree traversal mode and mesh traversal mode of the hierarchies are presented in this dissertation. It is shown through analysis that significant gains over broadcast schemes are achieved in the presence of high data dissemination request rates in which skewed access patterns exist. Moreover, it is shown through analysis that the performance of tree based traversal modes surpasses mesh traversal modes in transmission costs for address resolution in the worst scenario case, but underperforms when considering the speed of the resolution process and the path length formed. |
