Proactive Highly Ambulatory Sensor Routing (PHASeR) protocol for mobile wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a novel multihop routing protocol for mobile wireless sensor networks called PHASeR (Proactive Highly Ambulatory Sensor Routing). The proposed protocol uses a simple hop-count metric to enable the dynamic and robust routing of data towards the sink in mobile environments. It is motivated by the application of radiation mapping by unmanned vehicles, which requires the reliable and timely delivery of regular measurements to the sink. PHASeR maintains a gradient metric in mobile environments by using a global TDMA MAC layer. It also uses the technique of blind forwarding to pass messages through the network in a multipath manner. PHASeR is analysed mathematically based on packet delivery ratio, average packet delay, throughput and overhead. It is then simulated with varying mobility, scalability and traffic loads. The protocol gives good results over all measures, which suggests that it may also be suitable for a wider array of emerging applications

Improving the design of wireless sensor networks using QoS-aware opportunistic techniques

The design of a Wireless Sensor Network with QoS is a challenging and complex topic especially when the post-deployment corrections are expensive. This paper proposes a design methodology of Wireless Sensor Networks to estimate network performance in terms of end-to-end delay and reliability. It uses a probabilistic model to determine the needed node density, then adopting a variant of geographic routing it lets to calculate the number of path hops. The introduced opportunistic mechanism offers a trade-off between low end-to-end delay and reliable packets delivery. The modeled network with the adopted Geographic Opportunistic Routing has been evaluated through simulations and some guidelines about its design in order to obtain desired performance are given

Location aware sensor routing (LASeR) protocol for mobile wireless sensor networks

Location aware sensor routing (LASeR) protocol is a novel solution to the challenges of routing in mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs). It addresses the high reliability and low latency requirements of emerging applications. The protocol uses location information to maintain a gradient field even in highly mobile environments, whilst reducing the routing overhead. This allows the protocol to utilise a blind forwarding technique to propagate packets towards the sink. The protocol inherently utilises multiple paths simultaneously to create route diversity and increase its robustness. LASeR is designed for use in a high variety of MWSN applications with autonomous land, sea or air vehicles. Analytical expressions are derived and evaluated against the simulations. Extensive modelling and simulation of the proposed routing protocol has shown it to be highly adaptable and robust. It is compared with the recent MWSN proactive highly ambulatory sensor routing protocol, the high performance mobility adaptive cross-layer routing protocol, as well as ad-hoc on-demand distance vector and optimised link state routing. Protocols are evaluated on packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, overhead, throughput and energy consumption. The results highlight both the high performance of LASeR in various challenging environments and its superiority over the state-of-the-art

Energy-efficient broadcasting with cooperative transmissions in wireless sensor networks

[[abstract]]Broadcasting is a method that allows the distributed nodes in a wireless sensor network to share its data efficiently among each other. Due to the limited energy supplies of a sensor node, energy efficiency has become a crucial issue in the design of broadcasting protocols. In this paper, we analyze the energy savings provided by a cooperative form of broadcast, called the Opportunistic Large Arrays (OLA), and compare it to the performance of conventional multi-hop networks where no cooperation is utilized for transmission. The cooperation in OLA allows the receivers to utilize for detection the accumulation of signal energy provided by the transmitters that are relaying the same symbol. In this work, we derive the optimal energy allocation policy that minimizes the total energy cost of the OLA network subject to the SNR (or BER) requirements at all receivers. Even though the cooperative broadcast protocol provides significant energy savings, we prove that the optimum assignment for cooperative networks is an NP-complete problem and, thus, requires high computational complexity in general. We then introduce several suboptimal yet scalable solutions and show the significant energy-savings that one can obtain even with the approximate solutions.[[fileno]]2030137030017[[department]]電機工程學

Lifenet: a flexible ad hoc networking solution for transient environments

In the wake of major disasters, the failure of existing communications infrastructure and the subsequent lack of an effective communication solution results in increased risks, inefficiencies, damage and casualties. Currently available options such as satellite communication are expensive and have limited functionality. A robust communication solution should be affordable, easy to deploy, require little infrastructure, consume little power and facilitate Internet access. Researchers have long proposed the use of ad hoc wireless networks for such scenarios. However such networks have so far failed to create any impact, primarily because they are unable to handle network transience and have usability constraints such as static topologies and dependence on specific platforms. LifeNet is a WiFi-based ad hoc data communication solution designed for use in highly transient environments. After presenting the motivation, design principles and key insights from prior literature, the dissertation introduces a new routing metric called Reachability and a new routing protocol based on it, called Flexible Routing. Roughly speaking, reachability measures the end-to-end multi-path probability that a packet transmitted by a source reaches its final destination. Using experimental results, it is shown that even with high transience, the reachability metric - (1) accurately captures the effects of transience (2) provides a compact and eventually consistent global network view at individual nodes, (3) is easy to calculate and maintain and (4) captures availability. Flexible Routing trades throughput for availability and fault-tolerance and ensures successful packet delivery under varying degrees of transience. With the intent of deploying LifeNet on field we have been continuously interacting with field partners, one of which is Tata Institute of Social Sciences India. We have refined LifeNet iteratively refined base on their feedback. I conclude the thesis with lessons learned from our field trips so far and deployment plans for the near future.MSCommittee Chair: Santosh Vempala; Committee Member: Ashok Jhunjhunwala; Committee Member: Michael Best; Committee Member: Nick Feamste