Multi-Channel Scheduling for Fast Convergecast in Wireless Sensor Networks

We explore the following fundamental question - how fast can information be collected from a wireless sensor network? We consider a number of design parameters such as, power control, time and frequency scheduling, and routing. There are essentially two factors that hinder efficient data collection - interference and the half-duplex single-transceiver radios. We show that while power control helps in reducing the number of transmission slots to complete a convergecast under a single frequency channel, scheduling transmissions on different frequency channels is more efficient in mitigating the effects of interference (empirically, 6 channels suffice for most 100-node networks). With these observations, we define a receiver-based channel assignment problem, and prove it to be NP-complete on general graphs. We then introduce a greedy channel assignment algorithm that efficiently eliminates interference, and compare its performance with other existing schemes via simulations. Once the interference is completely eliminated, we show that with half-duplex single-transceiver radios the achievable schedule length is lower-bounded by max(2nk − 1,N), where nk is the maximum number of nodes on any subtree and N is the number of nodes in the network. We modify an existing distributed time slot assignment algorithm to achieve this bound when a suitable balanced routing scheme is employed. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that convergecast can be completed within up to 50% less time slots, in 100-node networks, using multiple channels as compared to that with single-channel communication. Finally, we also demonstrate further improvements that are possible when the sink is equipped with multiple transceivers or when there are multiple sinks to collect data

Algorithms for Fast Aggregated Convergecast in Sensor Networks

Fast and periodic collection of aggregated data is of considerable interest for mission-critical and continuous monitoring applications in sensor networks. In the many-to-one communication paradigm, referred to as convergecast, we focus on applications wherein data packets are aggregated at each hop en-route to the sink along a tree-based routing topology, and address the problem of minimizing the convergecast schedule length by utilizing multiple frequency channels. The primary hindrance in minimizing the schedule length is the presence of interfering links. We prove that it is NP-complete to determine whether all the interfering links in an arbitrary network can be removed using at most a constant number of frequencies. We give a sufficient condition on the number of frequencies for which all the interfering links can be removed, and propose a polynomial time algorithm that minimizes the schedule length in this case. We also prove that minimizing the schedule length for a given number of frequencies on an arbitrary network is NP-complete, and describe a greedy scheme that gives a constant factor approximation on unit disk graphs. When the routing tree is not given as an input to the problem, we prove that a constant factor approximation is still achievable for degree-bounded trees. Finally, we evaluate our algorithms through simulations and compare their performance under different network parameters

Improving a branch-and-bound approach for the degree-constrained minimum spanning tree problem with LKH

The degree-constrained minimum spanning tree problem, which involves finding a minimum spanning tree of a given graph with upper bounds on the vertex degrees, has found multiple applications in several domains. In this paper, we propose a novel CP approach to tackle this problem where we extend a recent branch-and-bound approach with an adaptation of the LKH local search heuristic to deal with trees instead of tours. Every time a solution is found, it is locally optimised by our new heuristic, thus yielding a tightened cut. Our experimental evaluation shows that this significantly speeds up the branch-and-bound search and hence closes the performance gap to the state-of-the-art bottom-up CP approach

Lifetime Analysis of Reliable Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network is comprised of a large number of battery-limited sensor nodes communicating with unreliable radio links. The nodes are deployed in an ad hoc fashion and a reverse multicast tree is formed in the target domain. The sink node disseminates a query and collects responses from the sensors over pre-established links. Survivability in wireless sensor networks reflects the ability of the network to continue to detect events in the case of individual node failures. We present a sender initiated path switching algorithm that enables the immediate sender to change the packet's route dynamically when its parent on the reverse path is down. The overall effect of path switching on the survivability is analyzed as a measure of reliable event delivery. Using independent battery capacities, an analytical model of a multihop network is derived. The model is used to predict the maximum network lifetime in terms of total transmitted messages; which is in turn used to verify the correctness of our simulations. The results have revealed that dynamic path switching has a better performance than static multipath routing and salvaging schemes. It has also been shown that the proposed approach enhances reliability up to 30% in some topologies