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

A Comprehensive Survey of Potential Game Approaches to Wireless Networks

Potential games form a class of non-cooperative games where unilateral improvement dynamics are guaranteed to converge in many practical cases. The potential game approach has been applied to a wide range of wireless network problems, particularly to a variety of channel assignment problems. In this paper, the properties of potential games are introduced, and games in wireless networks that have been proven to be potential games are comprehensively discussed.Comment: 44 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E98-B, no. 9, Sept. 201

Resource design in constrained networks for network lifetime increase

As constrained "things" become increasingly integrated with the Internet and accessible for interactive communication, energy efficient ways to collect, aggregate, and share data over such constrained networks are needed. In this paper, we propose the use of constrained RESTful environments interfaces to build resource collections having a network lifetime increase in mind. More specifically, based on existing atomic resources, collections are created/designed to become available as new resources, which can be observed. Such resource design should not only match client's interests, but also increase network lifetime as much as possible. For this to happen, energy consumption should be balanced/fair among nodes so that node depletion is delayed. When compared with previous approaches, results show that energy efficiency and network lifetime can be increased while reducing control/registration messages, which are used to set up or change observations

A Theoretical Review of Topological Organization for Wireless Sensor Network

The recent decades have seen the growth in the fields of wireless communication technologies, which has made it possible to produce components with a rational cost of a few cubic millimeters of volume, called sensors. The collaboration of many of these wireless sensors with a basic base station gives birth to a network of wireless sensors. The latter faces numerous problems related to application requirements and the inadequate abilities of sensor nodes, particularly in terms of energy. In order to integrate the different models describing the characteristics of the nodes of a WSN, this paper presents the topological organization strategies to structure its communication. For large networks, partitioning into sub-networks (clusters) is a technique used to reduce consumption, improve network stability and facilitate scalability

Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks: An Overview

Mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) have emerged and shifted the focus from the typical static wireless sensor networks to networks with mobile sensor nodes that are capable to sense the various types of events. Also, they can change their position frequently in a specific sensing area. The applications of the MWSNs can be widely divided into time-driven, event-driven, on-demand and tracking based applications. Mobile sensor node architecture, residual energy utilization, mobility, topology, scalability, localization, data collection routing, Quality of Service (QoS), etc., are the key factors to design an energy efficient MWSNs for some specific purpose. This chapter deals with an overview of the MWSNs and a few significant phenomena to design an energy efficient MWSNs to the large-scale environment

Recent advances in wireless sensor networks with environmental energy harvesting

Shu, L.; Liao, W.; Lloret, J.; Wang, L. (2016). Recent advances in wireless sensor networks with environmental energy harvesting. International Journal of Sensor Networks. 21(4):205-207. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/18736720520721