Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Traffic eavesdropping based scheme to deliver time-sensitive data in sensor networks

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, neighbouring sensor nodes may overhear packets transmissions from each other even if they are not the intended recipients of these transmissions. This redundant packet reception leads to unnecessary expenditure of battery energy of the recipients. Particularly in highly dense sensor networks, overhearing or eavesdropping overheads can constitute a significant fraction of the total energy consumption. Since overhearing of wireless traffic is unavoidable and sometimes essential, a new distributed energy efficient scheme is proposed in this paper. This new scheme exploits the inevitable overhearing effect as an effective approach in order to collect the required information to perform energy efficient delivery for data aggregation. Based on this approach, the proposed scheme achieves moderate energy consumption and high packet delivery rate notwithstanding the occurrence of high link failure rates. The performance of the proposed scheme is experimentally investigated a testbed of TelosB motes in addition to ns-2 simulations to validate the performed experiments on large-scale network

Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks, explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogeneous network deployment based on micro, pico and femto-cells can be used to achieve this goal. Since cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a "green" cellular network technologyComment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Scalable energy-efficient routing in mobile Ad hoc network

The quick deployment without any existing infrastructure makes mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) a striking choice for dynamic situations such as military and rescue operations, disaster recovery, and so on and so forth. However, routing remains one of the major issues in MANET due to the highly dynamic and distributed environment. Energy consumption is also a significant issue in ad hoc networks since the nodes are battery powered. This report discusses some major dominating set based approaches to perform energy efficient routing in mobile ad hoc networks. It also presents the performance results for each of these mentioned approaches in terms of throughput, average end to end delay and the life time in terms of the first node failure. Based on the simulation results, I identified the key issues in these protocols regarding network life time. In this report, I propose and discuss a new approach “Dynamic Dominating Set Generation Algorithm” (DDSG) to optimize the network life time. This algorithm dynamically selects dominating nodes during the process of routing and thus creates a smaller dominating set. DDSG algorithm thereby eliminates the energy consumption from the non-used dominating nodes. In order to further increase the network life time, the algorithm takes into consideration the threshold settings which helps to distribute the process of routing within the network. This helps to eliminate a single dominating node from getting drained out by continuous transmission and reception of packets. In this report, the detailed algorithmic design and performance results through simulation is discussed

A performance study of routing protocols for mobile grid environment

Integration of mobile wireless consumer devices into the Grid initially seems unlikely due to limitation such as CPU performance,small secondary storage, heightened battery consumption sensitivity and unreliable low-bandwidth communication. The current grid architecture and algorithm also do not take into account the mobile computing environment since mobile devices have not been seriously considered as valid computing resources or interfaces in grid communities. This paper presents the results of simulation done in identifying a suitable ad hoc routing protocol that can be used for the target grid application in mobile environment. The simulation comparing three ad hoc routing protocols named DSDV, DSR and AODV

Time Segmentation Approach Allowing QoS and Energy Saving for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are conceived to monitor a certain application or physical phenomena and are supposed to function for several years without any human intervention for maintenance. Thus, the main issue in sensor networks is often to extend the lifetime of the network by reducing energy consumption. On the other hand, some applications have high priority traffic that needs to be transferred within a bounded end-to-end delay while maintaining an energy efficient behavior. We propose MaCARI, a time segmentation protocol that saves energy, improves the overall performance of the network and enables quality of service in terms of guaranteed access to the medium and end-to-end delays. This time segmentation is achieved by synchronizing the activity of nodes using a tree-based beacon propagation and allocating activity periods for each cluster of nodes. The tree-based topology is inspired from the cluster-tree proposed by the ZigBee standard. The efficiency of our protocol is proven analytically, by simulation and through real testbed measurements