Energy-aware sink node localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a family of wireless networks that usually operate with irreplaceable batteries. The energy sources limitation raises the need for designing specific protocols to prolong the operational lifetime of such networks. These protocols are responsible for messages exchanging through the wireless communications medium from the sensors to the base station (sink node). Therefore, the determination of the optimal location of the sink node becomes crucial to assure both the prolongation of the network’s operation and the quality of the provided services. This paper proposes a novel algorithm based on a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach for designing an energy-aware topology control protocol. The deliverable of the algorithm is the optimal sink node location within a deployment area. The proposed objective function is based on a number of topology control protocol’s characteristics such as numbers of neighbors per node, the nodes’ residual energy, and how they are far from the center of the deployment area. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reveals significant effectiveness to both topology construction and maintenance phases of a topology control protocol in terms of the number of active nodes, the topology construction time, the number of topology reconstructions, and the operational network’s lifetime.Web of Scienceart. ID 81035

Energy Efficient Ant Colony Algorithms for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a family of ant colony algorithms called DAACA for data aggregation has been presented which contains three phases: the initialization, packet transmission and operations on pheromones. After initialization, each node estimates the remaining energy and the amount of pheromones to compute the probabilities used for dynamically selecting the next hop. After certain rounds of transmissions, the pheromones adjustment is performed periodically, which combines the advantages of both global and local pheromones adjustment for evaporating or depositing pheromones. Four different pheromones adjustment strategies are designed to achieve the global optimal network lifetime, namely Basic-DAACA, ES-DAACA, MM-DAACA and ACS-DAACA. Compared with some other data aggregation algorithms, DAACA shows higher superiority on average degree of nodes, energy efficiency, prolonging the network lifetime, computation complexity and success ratio of one hop transmission. At last we analyze the characteristic of DAACA in the aspects of robustness, fault tolerance and scalability.Comment: To appear in Journal of Computer and System Science

Monitoring a large construction site using wireless sensor networks

Despite the significant advances made by wireless sensor network research, deployments of such networks in real application environments are fraught with significant difficulties and challenges that include robust topology design, network diagnostics and maintenance. Based on our experience of a six-month-long wireless sensor network deployment in a large construction site, we highlight these challenges and argue the need for new tools and enhancements to current protocols to address these challenges.This research has been funded by the EPSRC Innovation and Knowledge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction project (EP/K000314/1). We would like to thank Costain-Skanska Joint Venture (CSJV) and our industrial partner Crossrail for allowing access and instrumentation of the Paddington site. We would also like to thank Dr Munenori Shibata from Japan Railway Technical Research Institute for his assistance with network deployment.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2820990.2820997 Data supporting this paper is available from https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250538

A network-aware framework for energy-efficient data acquisition in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks enable users to monitor the physical world at an extremely high fidelity. In order to collect the data generated by these tiny-scale devices, the data management community has proposed the utilization of declarative data-acquisition frameworks. While these frameworks have facilitated the energy-efficient retrieval of data from the physical environment, they were agnostic of the underlying network topology and also did not support advanced query processing semantics. In this paper we present KSpot+, a distributed network-aware framework that optimizes network efficiency by combining three components: (i) the tree balancing module, which balances the workload of each sensor node by constructing efficient network topologies; (ii) the workload balancing module, which minimizes data reception inefficiencies by synchronizing the sensor network activity intervals; and (iii) the query processing module, which supports advanced query processing semantics. In order to validate the efficiency of our approach, we have developed a prototype implementation of KSpot+ in nesC and JAVA. In our experimental evaluation, we thoroughly assess the performance of KSpot+ using real datasets and show that KSpot+ provides significant energy reductions under a variety of conditions, thus significantly prolonging the longevity of a WSN

A Scale-Free Topology Construction Model for Wireless Sensor Networks

A local-area and energy-efficient (LAEE) evolution model for wireless sensor networks is proposed. The process of topology evolution is divided into two phases. In the first phase, nodes are distributed randomly in a fixed region. In the second phase, according to the spatial structure of wireless sensor networks, topology evolution starts from the sink, grows with an energy-efficient preferential attachment rule in the new node's local-area, and stops until all nodes are connected into network. Both analysis and simulation results show that the degree distribution of LAEE follows the power law. This topology construction model has better tolerance against energy depletion or random failure than other non-scale-free WSN topologies.Comment: 13pages, 3 figure

Distributed Service Discovery for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Service discovery in heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks is a challenging research objective, due to the inherent limitations of sensor nodes and their extensive and dense deployment. The protocols proposed for ad hoc networks are too heavy for sensor environments. This paper presents a resourceaware solution for the service discovery problem, which exploits the heterogeneous nature of the sensor network and alleviates the high-density problem from the flood-based approaches. The idea is to organize nodes into clusters, based on the available resources and the dynamics of nodes. The clusterhead nodes act as a distributed directory of service registrations. Service discovery messages are exchanged among the nodes in the distributed directory. The simulation results show the performance of the service discovery protocol in heterogeneous dense environments

Implementation and evaluation of the sensornet protocol for Contiki

Sensornet Protocol (SP) is a link abstraction layer between the network layer and the link layer for sensor networks. SP was proposed as the core of a future-oriented sensor node architecture that allows flexible and optimized combination between multiple coexisting protocols. This thesis implements the SP sensornet protocol on the Contiki operating system in order to: evaluate the effectiveness of the original SP services; explore further requirements and implementation trade-offs uncovered by the original proposal. We analyze the original SP design and the TinyOS implementation of SP to design the Contiki port. We implement the data sending and receiving part of SP using Contiki processes, and the neighbor management part as a group of global routines. The evaluation consists of a single-hop traffic throughput test and a multihop convergecast test. Both tests are conducted using both simulation and experimentation. We conclude from the evaluation results that SP's link-level abstraction effectively improves modularity in protocol construction without sacrificing performance, and our SP implementation on Contiki lays a good foundation for future protocol innovations in wireless sensor networks

Graph-theoretic channel modeling and topology control protocols for wireless sensor networks

This report addresses two different research problems: (i) It presents a wireless channel model that reduces the complexity associated with high order Markov chains; and (ii) presents energy efficient topology control protocols which provide reliability while maintaining the topology in an energy efficient manner. For the above problems, real wireless sensor network traces were collected and extensive simulations were performed for evaluating the proposed protocols. Accurate simulation and analysis of wireless networks are inherently dependent on accurate models which are able to provide real-time channel characterization. High-order Markov chains are typically used to model errors and losses over wireless channels. However, complexity (i.e., the number of states) of a high-order Markov model increases exponentially with the memory-length of the underlying channel. In this report, a novel graph-theoretic methodology that uses Hamiltonian circuits to reduce the complexity of a high-order Markov model to a desired state budget is presented. The implication of unused states in complexity reduction of higher order Markov model is also explained. The trace-driven performance evaluations for real wireless local area network (WLAN) and wireless sensor network (WSN) channels demonstrate that the proposed Hamiltonian Model, while providing orders of magnitude reduction in complexity, renders an accuracy that is comparable to the Markov model and better than the existing reduced state models. Furthermore, a methodology to preserve energy is presented to increase the network lifetime by reducing the node degree forming an active backbone while considering network connectivity. However, in energy stringent wireless sensor networks, it is of utmost importance to construct the reduced topology with the minimal control overhead. Moreover, most wireless links in practice are lossy links with connectivity probability which desires that a routing protocol provides routing flexibility and reliability at a minimum energy consumption cost. For this purpose, distributed and semi-distributed novel graph-theoretic topology construction protocols are presented that exploit cliques and polygons in a WSN to achieve energy efficiency and reliability. The proposed protocols also facilitate load rotation under topology maintenance, thereby extending the network lifetime. In addition to the above, the report also evaluates why the backbone construction using connected dominating set (CDS) in certain cases remains unable to provide connected sensing coverage in the area covered. For this purpose, a novel protocol that reduces the topology while considering sensing area coverage is presented

On Mobility Management in Multi-Sink Sensor Networks for Geocasting of Queries

In order to efficiently deal with location dependent messages in multi-sink wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is key that the network informs sinks what geographical area is covered by which sink. The sinks are then able to efficiently route messages which are only valid in particular regions of the deployment. In our previous work (see the 5th and 6th cited documents), we proposed a combined coverage area reporting and geographical routing protocol for location dependent messages, for example, queries that are injected by sinks. In this paper, we study the case where we have static sinks and mobile sensor nodes in the network. To provide up-to-date coverage areas to sinks, we focus on handling node mobility in the network. We discuss what is a better method for updating the routing structure (i.e., routing trees and coverage areas) to handle mobility efficiently: periodic global updates initiated from sinks or local updates triggered by mobile sensors. Simulation results show that local updating perform very well in terms of query delivery ratio. Local updating has a better scalability to increasing network size. It is also more energy efficient than ourpreviously proposed approach, where global updating in networks have medium mobility rate and speed