Patent ID: 7720993

Claim:
A method of routing at least one information query from one or more sensor network entry points in a network of sensor nodes to one or more destination nodes in a vicinity of physical phenomena of interest in the network, the method comprising: selecting a destination node by computing a utility of a plurality of network sensor nodes and selecting a node with highest utility to be the destination node wherein the computed utility indicates information gain; establishing a leader node; using a multiple step lookup procedure to determine a path between the leader node and the destination node that is optimum with respect to utility; and routing at least one information query to the destination node based on the path, a locus of all possible paths from a current node in the path to the destination node that can be traversed within a specified path length forms an ellipse with the destination node as one focus point and the current node as another focus point, the ellipse is sampled with four candidate points, a maximum utility among four paths corresponding to the four candidate points, is assigned as the utility of the ellipse; and the four paths start at the current node, end at the destination node, and traverse one of the ellipse's minor axis or major axis.