5. Routing based on self-organization

In some cases, it's a good idea to pool resources. To do this, we'll elect a local leader who will be in charge of collecting and transmitting data from his or her group. In this way, only the leader consumes more energy. But the election must be dynamic, taking several criteria into account, and must take place periodically to take account of network dynamics, but also so that each sensor takes the role of leader in turn, in order to balance energy consumption over time.

This is known as clustering. Clustering consists in forming groups of geographically close nodes (clusters) based on various criteria, according to the needs of the application.

There are many different kinds of clustering, some of which can create single-hop clusters (each sensor is one hop from its leader) or N-hop clusters, the size (number of sensors per cluster) or...