Load-balancing rendezvous approach for mobility-enabled adaptive energy-efficient data collection in WSNs

Copyright © 2020 KSII The tradeoff between energy conservation and traffic balancing is a dilemma problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). By analyzing the intrinsic relationship between cluster properties and long distance transmission energy consumption, we characterize three node sets of the cluster as a theoretical foundation to enhance high performance of WSNs, and propose optimal solutions by introducing rendezvous and Mobile Elements (MEs) to optimize energy consumption for prolonging the lifetime of WSNs. First, we exploit an approximate method based on the transmission distance from the different node to an ME to select suboptimal Rendezvous Point (RP) on the trajectory for ME to collect data. Then, we define data transmission routing sequence and model rendezvous planning for the cluster. In order to achieve optimization of energy consumption, we specifically apply the economic theory called Diminishing Marginal Utility Rule (DMUR) and create the utility function with regard to energy to develop an adaptive energy consumption optimization framework to achieve energy efficiency for data collection. At last, Rendezvous Transmission Algorithm (RTA) is proposed to better tradeoff between energy conservation and traffic balancing. Furthermore, via collaborations among multiple MEs, we design Two-Orbit Back-Propagation Algorithm (TOBPA) which concurrently handles load imbalance phenomenon to improve the efficiency of data collection. The simulation results show that our solutions can improve energy efficiency of the whole network and reduce the energy consumption of sensor nodes, which in turn prolong the lifetime of WSNs

Cooperative mobility maintenance techniques for information extraction from mobile wireless sensor networks

Recent advances in the development of microprocessors, microsensors, ad-hoc wireless networking and information fusion algorithms led to increasingly capable Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Besides severe resource constraints, sensor nodes mobility is considered a fundamental characteristic of WSNs. Information Extraction (IE) is a key research area within WSNs that has been characterised in a variety of ways, ranging from a description of its purposes to reasonably abstract models of its processes and components. The problem of IE is a challenging task in mobile WSNs for several reasons including: the topology changes rapidly; calculation of trajectories and velocities is not a trivial task; increased data loss and data delivery delays; and other context and application specific challenges. These challenges offer fundamentally new research problems. There is a wide body of literature about IE from static WSNs. These approaches are proved to be effective and efficient. However, there are few attempts to address the problem of IE from mobile WSNs. These attempts dealt with mobility as the need arises and do not deal with the fundamental challenges and variations introduced by mobility on the WSNs. The aim of this thesis is to develop a solution for IE from mobile WSNs. This aim is achieved through the development of a middle-layer solution, which enables IE approaches that were designed for the static WSNs to operate in the presence of multiple mobile nodes. This thesis contributes toward the design of a new self-stabilisation algorithm that provides autonomous adaptability against nodes mobility in a transparent manner to both upper network layers and user applications. In addition, this thesis proposes a dynamic network partitioning protocol to achieve high quality of information, scalability and load balancing. The proposed solution is flexible, may be applied to different application domains, and less complex than many existing approaches. The simplicity of the solutions neither demands great computational efforts nor large amounts of energy conservation. Intensive simulation experiments with real-life parameters provide evidence of the efficiency of the proposed solution. Performance experimentations demonstrate that the integrated DNP/SS protocol outperforms its rival in the literature in terms of timeliness (by up to 22%), packet delivery ratio (by up to 13%), network scalability (by up to 25%), network lifetime (by up to 40.6%), and energy consumption (by up to 39.5%). Furthermore, it proves that DNP/SS successfully allows the deployment of static-oriented IE approaches in hybrid networks without any modifications or adaptations

AN ENERGY EFFICIENT CROSS-LAYER NETWORK OPERATION MODEL FOR MOBILE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are modern technologies used to sense/control the environment whether indoors or outdoors. Sensor nodes are miniatures that can sense a specific event according to the end user(s) needs. The types of applications where such technology can be utilised and implemented are vast and range from households’ low end simple need applications to high end military based applications. WSNs are resource limited. Sensor nodes are expected to work on a limited source of power (e.g., batteries). The connectivity quality and reliability of the nodes is dependent on the quality of the hardware which the nodes are made of. Sensor nodes are envisioned to be either stationary or mobile. Mobility increases the issues of the quality of the operation of the network because it effects directly on the quality of the connections between the nodes

Enabling Hardware Green Internet of Things: A review of Substantial Issues

Between now and the near future, the Internet of Things (IoT) will redesign the socio-ecological morphology of the human terrain. The IoT ecosystem deploys diverse sensor platforms connecting millions of heterogeneous objects through the Internet. Irrespective of sensor functionality, most sensors are low energy consumption devices and are designed to transmit sporadically or continuously. However, when we consider the millions of connected sensors powering various user applications, their energy efficiency (EE) becomes a critical issue. Therefore, the importance of EE in IoT technology, as well as the development of EE solutions for sustainable IoT technology, cannot be overemphasised. Propelled by this need, EE proposals are expected to address the EE issues in the IoT context. Consequently, many developments continue to emerge, and the need to highlight them to provide clear insights to researchers on eco-sustainable and green IoT technologies becomes a crucial task. To pursue a clear vision of green IoT, this study aims to present the current state-of-the art insights into energy saving practices and strategies on green IoT. The major contribution of this study includes reviews and discussions of substantial issues in the enabling of hardware green IoT, such as green machine to machine, green wireless sensor networks, green radio frequency identification, green microcontroller units, integrated circuits and processors. This review will contribute significantly towards the future implementation of green and eco-sustainable IoT

Modelling and performability evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks

This thesis presents generic analytical models of homogeneous clustered Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with a centrally located Cluster Head (CH) coordinating cluster communication with the sink directly or through other intermediate nodes. The focus is to integrate performance and availability studies of WSNs in the presence of sensor nodes and channel failures and repair/replacement. The main purpose is to enhance improvement of WSN Quality of Service (QoS). Other research works also considered in this thesis include modelling of packet arrival distribution at the CH and intermediate nodes, and modelling of energy consumption at the sensor nodes. An investigation and critical analysis of wireless sensor network architectures, energy conservation techniques and QoS requirements are performed in order to improve performance and availability of the network. Existing techniques used for performance evaluation of single and multi-server systems with several operative states are investigated and analysed in details. To begin with, existing approaches for independent (pure) performance modelling are critically analysed with highlights on merits and drawbacks. Similarly, pure availability modelling approaches are also analysed. Considering that pure performance models tend to be too optimistic and pure availability models are too conservative, performability, which is the integration of performance and availability studies is used for the evaluation of the WSN models developed in this study. Two-dimensional Markov state space representations of the systems are used for performability modelling. Following critical analysis of the existing solution techniques, spectral expansion method and system of simultaneous linear equations are developed and used to solving the proposed models. To validate the results obtained with the two techniques, a discrete event simulation tool is explored. In this research, open queuing networks are used to model the behaviour of the CH when subjected to streams of traffic from cluster nodes in addition to dynamics of operating in the various states. The research begins with a model of a CH with an infinite queue capacity subject to failures and repair/replacement. The model is developed progressively to consider bounded queue capacity systems, channel failures and sleep scheduling mechanisms for performability evaluation of WSNs. Using the developed models, various performance measures of the considered system including mean queue length, throughput, response time and blocking probability are evaluated. Finally, energy models considering mean power consumption in each of the possible operative states is developed. The resulting models are in turn employed for the evaluation of energy saving for the proposed case study model. Numerical solutions and discussions are presented for all the queuing models developed. Simulation is also performed in order to validate the accuracy of the results obtained. In order to address issues of performance and availability of WSNs, current research present independent performance and availability studies. The concerns resulting from such studies have therefore remained unresolved over the years hence persistence poor system performance. The novelty of this research is a proposed integrated performance and availability modelling approach for WSNs meant to address challenges of independent studies. In addition, a novel methodology for modelling and evaluation of power consumption is also offered. Proposed model results provide remarkable improvement on system performance and availability in addition to providing tools for further optimisation studies. A significant power saving is also observed from the proposed model results. In order to improve QoS for WSN, it is possible to improve the proposed models by incorporating priority queuing in a mixed traffic environment. A model of multi-server system is also appropriate for addressing traffic routing. It is also possible to extend the proposed energy model to consider other sleep scheduling mechanisms other than On-demand proposed herein. Analysis and classification of possible arrival distribution of WSN packets for various application environments would be a great idea for enabling robust scientific research

AN ENERGY EFFICIENT CROSS-LAYER NETWORK OPERATION MODEL FOR MOBILE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are modern technologies used to sense/control the environment whether indoors or outdoors. Sensor nodes are miniatures that can sense a specific event according to the end user(s) needs. The types of applications where such technology can be utilised and implemented are vast and range from households’ low end simple need applications to high end military based applications. WSNs are resource limited. Sensor nodes are expected to work on a limited source of power (e.g., batteries). The connectivity quality and reliability of the nodes is dependent on the quality of the hardware which the nodes are made of. Sensor nodes are envisioned to be either stationary or mobile. Mobility increases the issues of the quality of the operation of the network because it effects directly on the quality of the connections between the nodes

Pervasive service discovery in low-power and lossy networks

Pervasive Service Discovery (SD) in Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) is expected to play a major role in realising the Internet of Things (IoT) vision. Such a vision aims to expand the current Internet to interconnect billions of miniature smart objects that sense and act on our surroundings in a way that will revolutionise the future. The pervasiveness and heterogeneity of such low-power devices requires robust, automatic, interoperable and scalable deployment and operability solutions. At the same time, the limitations of such constrained devices impose strict challenges regarding complexity, energy consumption, time-efficiency and mobility. This research contributes new lightweight solutions to facilitate automatic deployment and operability of LLNs. It mainly tackles the aforementioned challenges through the proposition of novel component-based, automatic and efficient SD solutions that ensure extensibility and adaptability to various LLN environments. Building upon such architecture, a first fully-distributed, hybrid pushpull SD solution dubbed EADP (Extensible Adaptable Discovery Protocol) is proposed based on the well-known Trickle algorithm. Motivated by EADPs’ achievements, new methods to optimise Trickle are introduced. Such methods allow Trickle to encompass a wide range of algorithms and extend its usage to new application domains. One of the new applications is concretized in the TrickleSD protocol aiming to build automatic, reliable, scalable, and time-efficient SD. To optimise the energy efficiency of TrickleSD, two mechanisms improving broadcast communication in LLNs are proposed. Finally, interoperable standards-based SD in the IoT is demonstrated, and methods combining zero-configuration operations with infrastructure-based solutions are proposed. Experimental evaluations of the above contributions reveal that it is possible to achieve automatic, cost-effective, time-efficient, lightweight, and interoperable SD in LLNs. These achievements open novel perspectives for zero-configuration capabilities in the IoT and promise to bring the ‘things’ to all people everywhere

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

Networking protocols for long life wireless sensor networks

My original contribution to knowledge is the creation of a WSN system that further improves the functionality of existing technology, whilst achieving improved power consumption and reliability. This thesis concerns the development of industrially applicable wireless sensor networks that are low-power, reliable and latency aware. This work aims to improve upon the state of the art in networking protocols for low-rate multi-hop wireless sensor networks. Presented is an application-driven co-design approach to the development of such a system. Starting with the physical layer, hardware was designed to meet industry specified requirements. The end system required further investigation of communications protocols that could achieve the derived application-level system performance specifications. A CSMA/TDMA hybrid MAC protocol was developed, leveraging numerous techniques from the literature and novel optimisations. It extends the current art with respect to power consumption for radio duty-cycled applications, and reliability, in dense wireless sensor networks, whilst respecting latency bounds. Specifically, it provides 100% packet delivery for 11 concurrent senders transmitting towards a single radio duty cycled sink-node. This is representative of an order of magnitude improvement over the comparable art, considering MAC-only mechanisms. A novel latency-aware routing protocol was developed to exploit the developed hardware and MAC protocol. It is based on a new weighted objective function with multiple fail safe mechanisms to ensure extremely high reliability and robustness. The system was empirically evaluated on two hardware platforms. These are the application-specific custom 868 MHz node and the de facto community-standard TelosB. Extensive empirical comparative performance analyses were conducted against the relevant art to demonstrate the advances made. The resultant system is capable of exceeding 10-year battery life, and exhibits reliability performance in excess of 99.9%