Simulating Real-Time Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) technology has been mainly used in the applications with low-frequency sampling and little computational complexity. Recently, new classes of WSN-based applications with different characteristics are being considered, including process control, industrial automation and visual surveillance. Such new applications usually involve relatively heavy computations and also present real-time requirements as bounded end-to- end delay and guaranteed Quality of Service. It becomes then necessary to employ proper resource management policies, not only for communication resources but also jointly for computing resources, in the design and development of such WSN-based applications. In this context, simulation can play a critical role, together with analytical models, for validating a system design against the parameters of Quality of Service demanded for. In this paper, we present RTNS, a publicly available free simulation tool which includes Operating System aspects in wireless distributed applications. RTNS extends the well-known NS-2 simulator with models of the CPU, the Real-Time Operating System and the application tasks, to take into account delays due to the computation in addition to the communication. We demonstrate the benefits of RTNS by presenting our simulation study for a complex WSN-based multi-view vision system for real-time event detection

Using genetic algorithms to optimise Wireless Sensor Network design

Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) have gained a lot of attention because of their potential to immerse deeper into people' lives. The applications of WSNs range from small home environment networks to large habitat monitoring. These highly diverse scenarios impose different requirements on WSNs and lead to distinct design and implementation decisions. This thesis presents an optimization framework for WSN design which selects a proper set of protocols and number of nodes before a practical network deployment. A Genetic Algorithm(GA)-based Sensor Network Design Tool(SNDT) is proposed in this work for wireless sensor network design in terms of performance, considering application-specific requirements, deployment constrains and energy characteristics. SNDT relies on offine simulation analysis to help resolve design decisions. A GA is used as the optimization tool of the proposed system and an appropriate fitness function is derived to incorporate many aspects of network performance. The configuration attributes optimized by SNDT comprise the communication protocol selection and the number of nodes deployed in a fixed area. Three specific cases : a periodic-measuring application, an event detection type of application and a tracking-based application are considered to demonstrate and assess how the proposed framework performs. Considering the initial requirements of each case, the solutions provided by SNDT were proven to be favourable in terms of energy consumption, end-to-end delay and loss. The user-defined application requirements were successfully achieved

Cross-layer energy optimisation of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks

Recent technological developments in embedded systems have led to the emergence of a new class of networks, known asWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where individual nodes cooperate wirelessly with each other with the goal of sensing and interacting with the environment.Many routing protocols have been developed tomeet the unique and challenging characteristics of WSNs (notably very limited power resources to sustain an expected lifetime of perhaps years, and the restricted computation, storage and communication capabilities of nodes that are nonetheless required to support large networks and diverse applications). No standards for routing have been developed yet for WSNs, nor has any protocol gained a dominant position among the research community. Routing has a significant influence on the overall WSN lifetime, and providing an energy efficient routing protocol remains an open problem. This thesis addresses the issue of designing WSN routing methods that feature energy efficiency. A common time reference across nodes is required in mostWSN applications. It is needed, for example, to time-stamp sensor samples and for duty cycling of nodes. Alsomany routing protocols require that nodes communicate according to some predefined schedule. However, independent distribution of the time information, without considering the routing algorithm schedule or network topology may lead to a failure of the synchronisation protocol. This was confirmed empirically, and was shown to result in loss of connectivity. This can be avoided by integrating the synchronisation service into the network layer with a so-called cross-layer approach. This approach introduces interactions between the layers of a conventional layered network stack, so that the routing layer may share information with other layers. I explore whether energy efficiency can be enhanced through the use of cross-layer optimisations and present three novel cross-layer routing algorithms. The first protocol, designed for hierarchical, cluster based networks and called CLEAR (Cross Layer Efficient Architecture for Routing), uses the routing algorithm to distribute time information which can be used for efficient duty cycling of nodes. The second method - called RISS (Routing Integrated Synchronization Service) - integrates time synchronization into the network layer and is designed to work well in flat, non-hierarchical network topologies. The third method - called SCALE (Smart Clustering Adapted LEACH) - addresses the influence of the intra-cluster topology on the energy dissipation of nodes. I also investigate the impact of the hop distance on network lifetime and propose a method of determining the optimal location of the relay node (the node through which data is routed in a two-hop network). I also address the problem of predicting the transition region (the zone separating the region where all packets can be received and that where no data can be received) and I describe a way of preventing the forwarding of packets through relays belonging in this transition region. I implemented and tested the performance of these solutions in simulations and also deployed these routing techniques on sensor nodes using TinyOS. I compared the average power consumption of the nodes and the precision of time synchronization with the corresponding parameters of a number of existing algorithms. All proposed schemes extend the network lifetime and due to their lightweight architecture they are very efficient on WSN nodes with constrained resources. Hence it is recommended that a cross-layer approach should be a feature of any routing algorithm for WSNs

An Enhanced Backbone-Assisted Reliable Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

An extremely reliable source to sink communication is required for most of the contemporary WSN applications especially pertaining to military, healthcare and disaster-recovery. However, due to their intrinsic energy, bandwidth and computational constraints, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) encounter several challenges in reliable source to sink communication. In this paper, we present a novel reliable topology that uses reliable hotlines between sensor gateways to boost the reliability of end-to-end transmissions. This reliable and efficient routing alternative reduces the number of average hops from source to the sink. We prove, with the help of analytical evaluation, that communication using hotlines is considerably more reliable than traditional WSN routing. We use reliability theory to analyze the cost and benefit of adding gateway nodes to a backbone-assisted WSN. However, in hotline assisted routing some scenarios where source and the sink are just a couple of hops away might bring more latency, therefore, we present a Signature Based Routing (SBR) scheme. SBR enables the gateways to make intelligent routing decisions, based upon the derived signature, hence providing lesser end-to-end delay between source to the sink communication. Finally, we evaluate our proposed hotline based topology with the help of a simulation tool and show that the proposed topology provides manifold increase in end-to-end reliability

A survey of flooding, gossip routing, and related schemes for wireless multi- hop networks

Flooding is an essential and critical service in computer networks that is used by many routing protocols to send packets from a source to all nodes in the network. As the packets are forwarded once by each receiving node, many copies of the same packet traverse the network which leads to high redundancy and unnecessary usage of the sparse capacity of the transmission medium. Gossip routing is a well-known approach to improve the flooding in wireless multi-hop networks. Each node has a forwarding probability p that is either statically per-configured or determined by information that is available at runtime, e.g, the node degree. When a packet is received, the node selects a random number r. If the number r is below p, the packet is forwarded and otherwise, in the most simple gossip routing protocol, dropped. With this approach the redundancy can be reduced while at the same time the reachability is preserved if the value of the parameter p (and others) is chosen with consideration of the network topology. This technical report gives an overview of the relevant publications in the research domain of gossip routing and gives an insight in the improvements that can be achieved. We discuss the simulation setups and results of gossip routing protocols as well as further improved flooding schemes. The three most important metrics in this application domain are elaborated: reachability, redundancy, and management overhead. The published studies used simulation environments for their research and thus the assumptions, models, and parameters of the simulations are discussed and the feasibility of an application for real world wireless networks are highlighted. Wireless mesh networks based on IEEE 802.11 are the focus of this survey but publications about other network types and technologies are also included. As percolation theory, epidemiological models, and delay tolerant networks are often referred as foundation, inspiration, or application of gossip routing in wireless networks, a brief introduction to each research domain is included and the applicability of the particular models for the gossip routing is discussed

Energy Efficient Approach for Collision Avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the main challenges in the wireless sensor network is to improve the performance of the network by extending the lifetime of the sensor nodes. Excessive packet collisions lead to packet losses and retransmissions, resulting in significant overhead costs and latency which in turn makes a need to design a distributed and scalable time slot allocation. A new proposal is proposed which avoids collisions between packets and also provides increased energy efficiency and further prolong network lifetime, in wireless sensor network

Energy Efficient and Secure Wireless Sensor Networks Design

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are emerging technologies that have the ability to sense, process, communicate, and transmit information to a destination, and they are expected to have significant impact on the efficiency of many applications in various fields. The resource constraint such as limited battery power, is the greatest challenge in WSNs design as it affects the lifetime and performance of the network. An energy efficient, secure, and trustworthy system is vital when a WSN involves highly sensitive information. Thus, it is critical to design mechanisms that are energy efficient and secure while at the same time maintaining the desired level of quality of service. Inspired by these challenges, this dissertation is dedicated to exploiting optimization and game theoretic approaches/solutions to handle several important issues in WSN communication, including energy efficiency, latency, congestion, dynamic traffic load, and security. We present several novel mechanisms to improve the security and energy efficiency of WSNs. Two new schemes are proposed for the network layer stack to achieve the following: (a) to enhance energy efficiency through optimized sleep intervals, that also considers the underlying dynamic traffic load and (b) to develop the routing protocol in order to handle wasted energy, congestion, and clustering. We also propose efficient routing and energy-efficient clustering algorithms based on optimization and game theory. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic game theoretic framework (i.e., hyper defense) to analyze the interactions between attacker and defender as a non-cooperative security game that considers the resource limitation. All the proposed schemes are validated by extensive experimental analyses, obtained by running simulations depicting various situations in WSNs in order to represent real-world scenarios as realistically as possible. The results show that the proposed schemes achieve high performance in different terms, such as network lifetime, compared with the state-of-the-art schemes