Energy cost and error performance of range-aware, anchor-free localization algorithms

Many applications that use sensor data from a wireless sensor network (WSN) require corresponding node position information as well. Therefore, it is not surprising that a common figure of merit for localization algorithms is the accuracy of the position estimate produced. Similarly, the amount of communication required by a localization algorithm is often of paramount interest as well since it is common knowledge that communication expends the most energy in a WSN. However, localization algorithms seldom characterize their communication cost. Furthermore, when they do it is often merely qualitative and is typically described as “expensive”. For two types of range-aware, anchor-free localization algorithms we found the opposite to be true. Rather than being expensive, the communication costs were quite modest. So much so that we maintain range-aware, anchor-free localization algorithms should be chosen on the basis of the accuracy required by the intended application independent of the communication cost.In this paper, we examine the effect of node degree, node distribution, range error and network size on distance error and communication cost for both incremental and concurrent versions of range-aware, anchor-free algorithms. The concurrent algorithm is twice as accurate as the incremental, but less efficient. Furthermore, node degree influences the energy cost of the algorithms the most, but neither algorithm uses more than a surprisingly small 0.8% of a 560 mA h battery. This result indicates less energy efficient localization algorithms can be tolerated, especially if they provide better accuracy. Furthermore, if energy does need to be conserved, there is not much savings available within the localization algorithm and savings must be found in other areas such as the MAC protocol or routing algorithm.     

D2F: A Routing Protocol for Distributed Data Fusion in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data fusion can be distributed into network and executed on network nodes, to reduce data from redundant sensor nodes, to fuse the information from complementary sensor nodes and to get the complete view from cooperative nodes. Consequently only the inference of interest is sent to end user. This distributed data fusion can significantly reduce the data transmission cost and there is no need for a powerful centralized node to process the collected information. However, to achieve the advantages of distributed data fusion and better utilization of network resources, each fusion function needs to be performed at particular network node for minimizing energy cost of data fusion application, both data transmission cost and computation cost. In this paper, distributed data fusion routing (D2F) is proposed, which is designed for deploying distributed data fusion application in wireless sensor networks. D2F can find the optimal route path and fusion placements for a given data fusion tree, which obtains the optimal energy consumption for in-network data fusion. D2F can also handle different link failures and maintain the optimality of energy cost of data fusion by adapting to the dynamic change of network.     

Joint Source–Channel Communication for Distributed Estimation in Sensor Networks

Power and bandwidth are scarce resources in dense wireless sensor networks and it is widely recognized that joint optimization of the operations of sensing, processing and communication can result in significant savings in the use of network resources. In this paper, a distributed joint source-channel communication architecture is proposed for energy-efficient estimation of sensor field data at a distant destination and the corresponding relationships between power, distortion, and latency are analyzed as a function of number of sensor nodes. The approach is applicable to a broad class of sensed signal fields and is based on distributed computation of appropriately chosen projections of sensor data at the destination - phase-coherent transmissions from the sensor nodes enable exploitation of the distributed beamforming gain for energy efficiency. Random projections are used when little or no prior knowledge is available about the signal field. Distinct features of the proposed scheme include: (1) processing and communication are combined into one distributed projection operation; (2) it virtually eliminates the need for in-network processing and communication; (3) given sufficient prior knowledge about the sensed data, consistent estimation is possible with increasing sensor density even with vanishing total network power; and (4) consistent signal estimation is possible with power and latency requirements growing at most sublinearly with the number of sensor nodes even when little or no prior knowledge about the sensed data is assumed at the sensor nodes.     

Software agent-based directed diffusion in wireless sensor network

In an environment where node density is massive, placement is heterogeneous and redundant sensory traffic is produced; limited network resources such as bandwidth and energy are hastily consumed by individual sensor nodes. Equipped with only a limited battery power supply, this minimizes the lifetime of these sensor nodes. At the network layer, many researchers have tackled this issue by proposing several energy efficient routing schemes. All these schemes tend to save energy by elevating redundant data traffic via in-network processing and choosing empirically good and shortest routing paths for transfer of sensory data to a central location (sink) for further, application-specific processing. Seldom has an attempt been made to reduce network traffic by moving the application-specific code to the source nodes. We unmitigated our efforts to augment the node lifetime within a sensor network by introducing mobile agents. These mobile agents can be used to greatly reduce communication costs, especially over low bandwidth links, by moving the processing function to the data rather than bringing the data to a central processor. Toward this end, we propose an agent-based directed diffusion approach to increase sensor node efficiency and we present the experimental results.     

移动无线传感网的生存时间优化算法研究

当sink节点位置固定不变时,分布在sink 节点周围的传感节点很容易成为枢纽节点,因转发较多的数据而过早失效。为解决上述问题,提出移动无线传感网的生存时间优化算法（LOAMWSN）。LOAMWSN算法考虑sink节点的移动,采用减聚类算法确定sink节点移动的锚点,采用最近邻插值法寻找能遍历所有锚点的最短路径近似解,采用分布式非同步Bellman-Ford算法构建sink节点k跳通信范围内的最短路径树。最终,传感节点沿着最短路径树将数据发送给sink节点。仿真结果表明：在节点均匀分布和非均匀分布的无线传感网中,LOAMWSN算法都可以延长网络生存时间、平衡节点能耗,将平均节点能耗保持在较低水平。在一定的条件下,比Ratio_w、TPGF算法更优。     

Connectivity constrained wireless sensor deployment using multiobjective evolutionary algorithms and fuzzy decision making

Deployment of sensor nodes is an important issue in designing sensor networks. The sensor nodes communicate with each other to transmit their data to a high energy communication node which acts as an interface between data processing unit and sensor nodes. Optimization of sensor node locations is essential to provide communication for a longer duration. An energy efficient sensor deployment based on multiobjective particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed here and compared with that of non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm. During the process of optimization, sensor nodes move to form a fully connected network. The two objectives i.e. coverage and lifetime are taken into consideration. The optimization process results in a set of network layouts. A comparative study of the performance of the two algorithms is carried out using three performance metrics. The sensitivity analysis of different parameters is also carried out which shows that the multiobjective particle swarm optimization algorithm is a better candidate for solving the multiobjective problem of deploying the sensors. A fuzzy logic based strategy is also used to select the best compromised solution on the Pareto front.     

Cross-Layer Collaborative In-Network Processing in Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

Emerging wireless sensor network (WSN) applications demand considerable computation capacity for in-network processing. To achieve the required processing capacity, cross-layer collaborative in-network processing among sensors emerges as a promising solution: sensors do not only process information at the application layer, but also synchronize their communication activities to exchange partially processed data for parallel processing. However, scheduling computation and communication events is a challenging problem in WSNs due to limited resource availability and shared communication medium. In this work, an application-independent task mapping and scheduling solution in multihop homogeneous WSNs, multihop task mapping and scheduling (MTMS), is presented that provides real-time guarantees. Using our proposed application model, the multihop channel model, and the communication scheduling algorithm, computation tasks and associated communication events are scheduled simultaneously. The dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) algorithm is presented to further optimize energy consumption. Simulation results show significant performance improvements compared with existing mechanisms in terms of minimizing energy consumption subject to delay constraints     

Directed diffusion for wireless sensor networking

Advances in processor, memory, and radio technology enable small and cheap nodes capable of sensing, communication, and computation. Networks of such nodes can coordinate to perform distributed sensing of environmental phenomena. We explore the directed diffusion paradigm for such coordination. Directed diffusion is data-centric in that all communication is for named data. All nodes in a directed-diffusion-based network are application aware. This enables diffusion to achieve energy savings by selecting empirically good paths and by caching and processing data in-network (e.g., data aggregation). We explore and evaluate the use of directed diffusion for a simple remote-surveillance sensor network analytically and experimentally. Our evaluation indicates that directed diffusion can achieve significant energy savings and can outperform idealized traditional schemes (e.g., omniscient multicast) under the investigated scenarios.     

Betweenness centrality based connectivity aware routing algorithm for prolonging network lifetime in wireless sensor networks

Network lifetime is the key design parameter for wireless sensor network protocols. In recent years, based on energy efficient routing techniques numerous methods have been proposed for enhancing network lifetime. These methods have mainly considered residual energy, number of hops and communication cost as route selection metrics. This paper introduces a method for further improvement in the network lifetime by considering network connectivity along with energy efficiency for the selection of data transmission routes. The network lifetime is enhanced by preserving highly connected nodes at initial rounds of data communication to ensure network connectivity during later rounds. Bassed on the above mentioned concept, a connectivity aware routing algorithm: CARA has been proposed. In the proposed algorithm, connectivity factor of a node is calculated on the basis of Betweenness centrality of a node and energy efficient routes are found by using fuzzy logic and ant colony optimization. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm CARA performs better than other related state-of-the-art energy efficient routing algorithms viz. FML, EEABR and FACOR in terms of network lifetime, connectivity, energy dissipation, load balancing and packet delivery ratio.     

Energy-Efficient Map Interpolation for Sensor Fields Using Kriging

We propose a spatial autocorrelation aware, energy efficient, and error bounded framework for interpolating maps from sensor fields. Specifically, we propose an iterative reporting framework that utilizes spatial interpolation models to reduce communication costs and enforce error control. The framework employs a simple and low overhead in-network coordination among sensors for selecting reporting sensors so that the coordination overhead does not eclipse the communication savings. Due to the probabilistic nature of the first round reporting, the framework is less sensitive to sensor failures and guarantees an error bound for all functional sensors for each epoch. We then propose a graceful integration of temporal data suppression models with our framework. This allows an adaptive utilization of spatial or temporal autocorrelation based on whichever is stronger in different regions of the sensor field. We conducted extensive experiments using data from a real-world sensor network deployment and a large Asian temperature dataset to show that the proposed framework significantly reduces messaging costs and is more resilient to sensor failures. We also implemented our proposed algorithms on a sensor network of MICAz motes. The results show that our algorithms save significant energy and the out of bound errors due to packet loss are below 5%.     

Network correlated data gathering with explicit communication: NP-completeness and algorithms

We consider the problem of correlated data gathering by a network with a sink node and a tree-based communication structure, where the goal is to minimize the total transmission cost of transporting the information collected by the nodes, to the sink node. For source coding of correlated data, we consider a joint entropy-based coding model with explicit communication where coding is simple and the transmission structure optimization is difficult. We first formulate the optimization problem definition in the general case and then we study further a network setting where the entropy conditioning at nodes does not depend on the amount of side information, but only on its availability. We prove that even in this simple case, the optimization problem is NP-hard. We propose some efficient, scalable, and distributed heuristic approximation algorithms for solving this problem and show by numerical simulations that the total transmission cost can be significantly improved over direct transmission or the shortest path tree. We also present an approximation algorithm that provides a tree transmission structure with total cost within a constant factor from the optimal.     

Efficient in-network moving object tracking in wireless sensor networks

The rapid progress of wireless communication and embedded microsensing MEMS technologies has made wireless sensor networks possible. In light of storage in sensors, a sensor network can be considered as a distributed database, in which one can conduct in-network data processing. An important issue of wireless sensor networks is object tracking, which typically involves two basic operations: update and query. This issue has been intensively studied in other areas, such as cellular networks. However, the in-network processing characteristic of sensor networks has posed new challenges to this issue. In this paper, we develop several tree structures for in-network object tracking which take the physical topology of the sensor network into consideration. The optimization process has two stages. The first stage tries to reduce the location update cost based on a deviation-avoidance principle and a highest-weight-first principle. The second stage further adjusts the tree obtained in the first stage to reduce the query cost. The way we model this problem allows us to analytically formulate the cost of object tracking given the update and query rates of objects. Extensive simulations are conducted, which show a significant improvement over existing solutions.     

Minimum Interference Channel Assignment in Multiradio Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, we consider multi-hop wireless mesh networks, where each router node is equipped with multiple radio interfaces and multiple channels are available for communication. We address the problem of assigning channels to communication links in the network with the objective of minimizing overall network interference. Since the number of radios on any node can be less than the number of available channels, the channel assignment must obey the constraint that the number of different channels assigned to the links incident on any node is atmost the number of radio interfaces on that node. The above optimization problem is known to be NP-hard. We design centralized and distributed algorithms for the above channel assignment problem. To evaluate the quality of the solutions obtained by our algorithms, we develop a semidefinite program and a linear program formulation of our optimization problem to obtain lower bounds on overall network interference. Empirical evaluations on randomly generated network graphs show that our algorithms perform close to the above established lower bounds, with the difference diminishing rapidly with increase in number of radios. Also, ns-2 simulations as well as experimental studies on testbed demonstrate the performance potential of our channel assignment algorithms in 802.11-based multi-radio mesh networks.     

Communication architecture for processing spatio-temporal continuous queries in sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have revolutionized distributed micro-sensing because of their ease of deployment, ad hoc connectivity and cost-effectiveness. They have also enabled collecting and monitoring data from a very large area or possibly several independent areas geographically separated from each other and such a process is known as spatio-temporal data monitoring. In this paper, we define an energy-aware routing infrastructure that enables distributed query processing and supports processing of spatio-temporal queries within the network. As operator execution demands high computation capability, we propose a possible use of a heterogeneous sensor network where query operators are assigned to sparsely-deployed resource-rich nodes within a dense network of low power sensor nodes. We have designed an adaptive, decentralized, low communication overhead algorithm to determine optimal operator placement on the resource-rich nodes such that data transfer cost in the network is minimized. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to build an energy-aware communication architecture to enable in-network processing of spatio-temporal queries.     

Connected sensor cover: self-organization of sensor networks for efficient query execution

Spatial query execution is an essential functionality of a sensor network, where a query gathers sensor data within a specific geographic region. Redundancy within a sensor network can be exploited to reduce the communication cost incurred in execution of such queries. Any reduction in communication cost would result in an efficient use of the battery energy, which is very limited in sensors. One approach to reduce the communication cost of a query is to self-organize the network, in response to a query, into a topology that involves only a small subset of the sensors sufficient to process the query. The query is then executed using only the sensors in the constructed topology. The self-organization technique is beneficial for queries that run sufficiently long to amortize the communication cost incurred in self-organization. In this paper, we design and analyze algorithms for suchself-organization of a sensor network to reduce energy consumption. In particular, we develop the notion of a connected sensor cover and design a centralized approximation algorithm that constructs a topology involving a near-optimal connected sensor cover. We prove that the size of the constructed topology is within an O(logn) factor of the optimal size, where n is the network size. We develop a distributed self-organization version of the approximation algorithm, and propose several optimizations to reduce the communication overhead of the algorithm. We also design another distributed algorithm based on node priorities that has a further lower communication overhead, but does not provide any guarantee on the size of the connected sensor cover constructed. Finally, we evaluate the distributed algorithms using simulations and show that our approaches results in significant communication cost reductions.     

On the effectiveness of movement prediction to reduce energy consumption in wireless communication

Node movement can be exploited to reduce the energy consumption of wireless network communication. The strategy consists in delaying communication until a mobile node moves close to its target peer node within an application- imposed deadline. We evaluate the performance of various heuristics that, based on the movement history of the mobile node, estimate an optimal time (in the sense of least energy use) of communication subject to the delay constraint. We evaluate the impact of the node movement model, length of movement history maintained, allowable delay, single hop versus multiple hop communication, and size of data transfer on the energy consumption. We also present measurement results on an iPAQ pocket PC that quantity energy consumption in executing the prediction algorithms. Our results show that, with relatively simple and, hence, efficient prediction heuristics, energy savings in communication can significantly outweigh the energy expenses in executing the prediction algorithms. Moreover, it is possible to achieve robust system performance across diverse node movement models.     

Information-directed routing in ad hoc sensor networks

In a sensor network, data routing is tightly coupled to the needs of a sensing task, and hence the application semantics. This paper introduces the novel idea of information-directed routing, in which routing is formulated as a joint optimization of data transport and information aggregation. The routing objective is to minimize communication cost, while maximizing information gain, differing from routing considerations for more general ad hoc networks. The paper uses the concrete problem of locating and tracking possibly moving signal sources as an example of information generation process, and considers two common information extraction patterns in a sensor network: routing a user query from an arbitrary entry node to the vicinity of signal sources and back, or to a prespecified exit node, maximizing information accumulated along the path. We derive information constraints from realistic signal models, and present several routing algorithms that find near-optimal solutions for the joint optimization problem. Simulation results have demonstrated that information-directed routing is a significant improvement over a previously reported greedy algorithm, as measured by sensing quality such as localization and tracking accuracy and communication quality such as success rate in routing around sensor holes.     

Effective Management of High Rate Spatio-Temporal Queries in Wireless Sensor Networks

Handling high rate queries have always posed a challenge in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) owing to their resource constrained nature. This paper proposes a scheme that performs centralized and distributed optimization to improve the scalability of the high rate spatio-temporal queries in WSNs. Queries are optimized centrally based on multiple criteria such as spatial topological relationships, temporal and attribute correlations. An energy efficient load balanced clustered tree routing based on minimum bounding rectangle spatial indexing scheme is employed to aid the in-network optimization of queries. Two algorithms have been proposed to carry out a centralized and distributed optimization that works adaptively on queries switching between optimal and sub-optimal modes to handle multiple concurrent queries reliably. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is highly scalable for large scale spatio-temporal queries and also has the added advantage of minimizing the energy consumption due to query and data transmission.     

DESP: a distributed economics-based subcontracting protocol for computation distribution in power-aware mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we present a new economics-based power-aware protocol, called the distributed economic subcontracting protocol (DESP) that dynamically distributes task computation among mobile devices in an ad hoc wireless network. Mobile computation devices may be energy buyers, contractors, or subcontractors. Tasks are transferred between devices via distributed bargaining and transactions. When additional energy is required, buyers and contractors negotiate energy prices within their local markets. Contractors and subcontractors spend communication and computation energy to relay or execute buyers' tasks. Buyers pay the negotiated price for this energy. Decision-making algorithms are proposed for buyers, contractors, and subcontractors, each of which has a different optimization goal. We have built a wireless network simulator, called ESIM, to assist in the design and analysis of these algorithms. When the average communication energy required transferring a task is less than the average energy required to execute a task, our experimental results indicate that markets based on our protocol and decision-making algorithms fairly and effectively allocate energy resources among different tasks in both cooperative and competitive scenarios.     

Reactive and adaptive monitoring to secure aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Data aggregation is considered as one of the fundamental distributed data processing procedures for saving the energy and minimizing the medium access layer contention in wireless sensor networks. However, sensor networks are likely to be deployed in an untrusted environment, which make them vulnerable against several attacks. A compromised node may forge arbitrary aggregation value and mislead the base station into trusting a false reading. Secure in-network aggregation can detect such manipulation. But, as long as such subversive activity is, reliable aggregation result can not be obtained. In contrast, the collection of individual sensor node values is robust and solves the problem of availability, but in an inefficient way. Our work seeks to bridge this gap in secure data collection. We propose a framework that enhances availability with efficiency close to that of in-network aggregation avoiding over-reliance on sensors. To achieve this, we design a scheme that is built on one core concept: no trust is supposed in any sensor. Therefore, we design a two hierarchical levels of monitoring to ensure the integrity and the accuracy of aggregate result, only when necessary, i.e. only when malicious activities are detected. Relying on this new type of monitoring mechanism, the framework has the ability to recover from aggregator failure without neglecting energy efficiency, providing thus much higher availability than other security protocols.