Network and control protocol for a wired self-organising sensor network

We present in this paper a protocol suitable for use in sensor networks composed of physically connected nodes that have stringent requirements in terms of computational power and performance. When network nodes are physically connected in a fixed pattern as described, it allows the protocol used to organise them to be very lightweight, and to run on hardware with memory measured only in hundreds of bytes. This is in contrast to other self-organising sensor networks which use wireless communication between nodes that are free to move about, and hence have a much larger protocol overhead.