A Routing Algorithm for Extending Mobile Sensor Network’s Lifetime using Connectivity and Target Coverage

In this paper, we propose an approach to improving the network lifetime by enhancing Network CONnectivity (NCON) and Target COVerage (TCOV) in randomly deployed Mobile Sensor Network (MSN). Generally, MSN refers to the collection of independent and scattered sensors with the capability of being mobile, if need be. Target coverage, network connectivity, and network lifetime are the three most critical issues of MSN. Any MSN formed with a set of randomly distributed sensors should be able to select and successfully activate some subsets of nodes so that they completely monitor or cover the entire Area of Interest (AOI). Network connectivity, on the other hand ensures that the nodes are connected for the full lifetime of the network so that collection and reporting of data to the sink node are kept uninterrupted through the sensor nodes. Keeping these three critical aspects into consideration, here we propose Socratic Random Algorithm (SRA) that ensures efficient target coverage and network connectivity alongside extending the lifetime of the network. The proposed method has been experimentally compared with other existing alternative mechanisms taking appropriate performance metrics into consideration. Our simulation results and analysis show that SRA performs significantly better than the existing schemes in the recent literature

On Prolonging Network Lifetime through Load-Similar Node Deployment in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper is focused on the study of the energy hole problem in the Progressive Multi-hop Rotational Clustered (PMRC)-structure, a highly scalable wireless sensor network (WSN) architecture. Based on an analysis on the traffic load distribution in PMRC-based WSNs, we propose a novel load-similar node distribution strategy combined with the Minimum Overlapping Layers (MOL) scheme to address the energy hole problem in PMRC-based WSNs. In this strategy, sensor nodes are deployed in the network area according to the load distribution. That is, more nodes shall be deployed in the range where the average load is higher, and then the loads among different areas in the sensor network tend to be balanced. Simulation results demonstrate that the load-similar node distribution strategy prolongs network lifetime and reduces the average packet latency in comparison with existing nonuniform node distribution and uniform node distribution strategies. Note that, besides the PMRC structure, the analysis model and the proposed load-similar node distribution strategy are also applicable to other multi-hop WSN structures

Energy-Efficient Self-Organization Protocols for Sensor Networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN, for short) consists of a large number of very small sensor devices deployed in an area of interest for gathering and delivery information. The fundamental goal of a WSN is to produce, over an extended period of time, global information from local data obtained by individual sensors. The WSN technology will have a significant impact on a wide array of applications on the efficiency of many civilian and military applications including combat field surveillance, intrusion detection, disaster management among many others. The basic management problem in the WSN is to balance the utility of the activity in the network against the cost incurred by the network resources to perform this activity. Since the sensors are battery powered and it is impossible to change or recharge batteries after the sensors are deployed, promoting system longevity becomes one of the most important design goals instead of QoS provisioning and bandwidth efficiency. On the other hand the self-organization ability is essential for the WSN due to the fact that the sensors are randomly deployed and they work unattended. We developed a self-organization protocol, which creates a multi-hop communication infrastructure capable of utilizing the limited resources of sensors in an adaptive and efficient way. The resulting general-purpose infrastructure is robust, easy to maintain and adapts well to various application needs. Important by-products of our infrastructure include: (1) Energy efficiency: in order to save energy and to extend the longevity of the WSN sensors, which are in sleep mode most of the time. (2) Adaptivity: the infrastructure is adaptive to network size, network topology, network density and application requirement. (3) Robustness: the degree to which the infrastructure is robust and resilient. Analytical results and simulation confirmed that our self-organization protocol has a number of desirable properties and compared favorably with the leading protocols in the literature

Energy hole mitigation through cooperative transmission in wireless sensor networks

The energy balancing capability of cooperative communication is utilized to solve the energy hole problem in wireless sensor networks. We first propose a cooperative transmission strategy, where intermediate nodes participate in two cooperative multi-input single-output (MISO) transmissions with the node at the previous hop and a selected node at the next hop, respectively. Then, we study the optimization problems for power allocation of the cooperative transmission strategy by examining two different approaches: network lifetime maximization (NLM) and energy consumption minimization (ECM). For NLM, the numerical optimal solution is derived and a searching algorithm for suboptimal solution is provided when the optimal solution does not exist. For ECM, a closed-form solution is obtained. Numerical and simulation results show that both the approaches have much longer network lifetime than SISO transmission strategies and other cooperative communication schemes. Moreover, NLM which features energy balancing outperforms ECM which focuses on energy efficiency, in the network lifetime sense

Improved Unequal-Clustering and Routing Protocol

Increased network lifetime is a desired property of low-powered and energy-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are deployed in wireless network environments. Clustering is used as a technique in multiple solutions to improve overall network lifetime. Further variants in the clustering process are defined to optimize the results. One such variant is equal clustering, where all the clusters have the same size. However, this approach suffers from the issue of nodes closer to the base station (BS) dying out earlier. As an alternative, unequal clustering is proposed, where clusters close to the BS are of smaller size; thus, cluster heads (CHs) consume a substantial proportion of their energy for being acting as data forwarding nodes. In this paper, we propose an unequal clustering approach with the BS at the center of a circular area. The size of each cluster is fixed and computed based on the node density of the area. The number of clusters increases from outwards to inwards towards the BS. The results show considerable performance gain over selected benchmark works

An energy-efficient mobile sink-based unequal clustering mechanism for WSNs

Network lifetime and energy efficiency are crucial performance metrics used to evaluate wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Decreasing and balancing the energy consumption of nodes can be employed to increase network lifetime. In cluster-based WSNs, one objective of applying clustering is to decrease the energy consumption of the network. In fact, the clustering technique will be considered effective if the energy consumed by sensor nodes decreases after applying clustering, however, this aim will not be achieved if the cluster size is not properly chosen. Therefore, in this paper, the energy consumption of nodes, before clustering, is considered to determine the optimal cluster size. A two-stage Genetic Algorithm (GA) is employed to determine the optimal interval of cluster size and derive the exact value from the interval. Furthermore, the energy hole is an inherent problem which leads to a remarkable decrease in the network’s lifespan. This problem stems from the asynchronous energy depletion of nodes located in different layers of the network. For this reason, we propose Circular Motion of Mobile-Sink with Varied Velocity Algorithm (CM2SV2) to balance the energy consumption ratio of cluster heads (CH). According to the results, these strategies could largely increase the network’s lifetime by decreasing the energy consumption of sensors and balancing the energy consumption among CHs

Improvement of non-uniform node deployment mechanism for corona-based wireless sensor networks

The promising technology of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), lots of applications have been developed for monitoring and tracking in military, commercial, and educational environments. Imbalance energy of sensors causes significant reduction in the lifetime of the network. In corona-based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), nodes that are positioned in coronas near the sink drain their energy faster than others as they are burdened with relaying traffic come from distant coronas forming energy holes in the network. This situation shows significant effects on the network efficiency in terms of lifetime and energy consumption. The network may stop operation prematurely even though there is much energy left unused at the distant nodes. In this thesis, non-uniform node deployments and energy provisioning strategies are proposed to mitigate energy holes problem. These strategies concerns the optimal number of sensors required in each corona in order to balance the energy consumption and to meet the coverage and connectivity requirements in the network. In order to achieve this aim, the number of sensors should be optimized to create sub-balanced coronas in the sense of energy consumption. The energy provisioning technique is proposed for harmonizing the energy consumption among coronas by computing the extra needed energy in every corona. In the proposed mechanism, the energy required in each corona for balanced energy consumption is computed by determining the initial energy in each node with respect to its corona, and according to the corona load while satisfying the network coverage and connectivity requirements. The theoretical design and modeling of the proposed sensors placement strategy promise a considerable improvement in the lifetime of corona-based networks. The proposed technique could improve the network lifetime noticeably via fair balancing of energy consumption ratio among coronas about 9.4 times more than other work. This is confirmed by the evaluation results that have been showed that the proposed solution offers efficient energy distribution that can enhance the lifetime about 40% compared to previous research works