An Energy Driven Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Most wireless sensor networks operate with very limited energy sources-their batteries, and hence their usefulness in real life applications is severely constrained. The challenging issues are how to optimize the use of their energy or to harvest their own energy in order to lengthen their lives for wider classes of application. Tackling these important issues requires a robust architecture that takes into account the energy consumption level of functional constituents and their interdependency. Without such architecture, it would be difficult to formulate and optimize the overall energy consumption of a wireless sensor network. Unlike most current researches that focus on a single energy constituent of WSNs independent from and regardless of other constituents, this paper presents an Energy Driven Architecture (EDA) as a new architecture and indicates a novel approach for minimising the total energy consumption of a WS

Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks: An Overview

Mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) have emerged and shifted the focus from the typical static wireless sensor networks to networks with mobile sensor nodes that are capable to sense the various types of events. Also, they can change their position frequently in a specific sensing area. The applications of the MWSNs can be widely divided into time-driven, event-driven, on-demand and tracking based applications. Mobile sensor node architecture, residual energy utilization, mobility, topology, scalability, localization, data collection routing, Quality of Service (QoS), etc., are the key factors to design an energy efficient MWSNs for some specific purpose. This chapter deals with an overview of the MWSNs and a few significant phenomena to design an energy efficient MWSNs to the large-scale environment

Real-life performance of protocol combinations for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks today are used for many and diverse applications like nature monitoring, or process and wireless building automation. However, due to the limited access to large testbeds and the lack of benchmarking standards, the real-life evaluation of network protocols and their combinations remains mostly unaddressed in current literature. To shed further light upon this matter, this paper presents a thorough experimental performance analysis of six protocol combinations for TinyOS. During these protocol assessments, our research showed that the real-life performance often differs substantially from the expectations. Moreover, we found that combining protocols is far from trivial, as individual network protocols may perform very different in combination with other protocols. The results of our research emphasize the necessity of a flexible generic benchmarking framework, powerful enough to evaluate and compare network protocols and their combinations in different use cases

Supporting protocol-independent adaptive QoS in wireless sensor networks

Next-generation wireless sensor networks will be used for many diverse applications in time-varying network/environment conditions and on heterogeneous sensor nodes. Although Quality of Service (QoS) has been ignored for a long time in the research on wireless sensor networks, it becomes inevitably important when we want to deliver an adequate service with minimal efforts under challenging network conditions. Until now, there exist no general-purpose QoS architectures for wireless sensor networks and the main QoS efforts were done in terms of individual protocol optimizations. In this paper we present a novel layerless QoS architecture that supports protocol-independent QoS and that can adapt itself to time-varying application, network and node conditions. We have implemented this QoS architecture in TinyOS on TmoteSky sensor nodes and we have shown that the system is able to support protocol-independent QoS in a real life office environment

Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks

Various architectures have been developed for wireless sensor networks. Many of them leave to the programmer important concepts as the way in which the inter-task communication and dynamic reconfigurations are addressed. In this paper we describe the characteristics of a new architecture we proposed - the data-centric architecture. This architecture offers an easy way of structuring the applications designed for wireless sensor nodes that confers them superior performances