Detecting and connecting disjoint sub-networks in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) can be considered as a combination of a sensor network and an actor network in which powerful and mobile actor nodes can perform application specific actions based on the received data from the sensors. As most of these actions are performed collaboratively among the actors, inter-actor connectivity is one of the desirable features of WSANs. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for establishing a connected inter-actor network topology. Considering initially disjoint sets of actors, our algorithm first initiates a search process by using the underlying sensor network in order to detect the possible sub-networks of actors in the region. After these sub-networks are detected, our algorithm pursues a coordinated actor movement in order to connect the sub-networks and thus achieve inter-actor connectivity for all the actors. This coordinated movement approach exploits the minimum connected dominating set of each sub-network when picking the appropriate actor to move so that the connectivity of each sub-network is not violated. In addition, the approach strives to minimize the total travel distance of actors and the messaging cost on both sensors and actors in order to extend the lifetime of WSAN. We analytically study the performance of our algorithm. Extensive simulation experiments validate the analytical results and confirm the effectiveness of our approach.     

Geographical routing and participant collaboration model based communication mechanism of WSAN

The communication mechanism of wireless sensor and actor network (WSAN) was studied.Firstly,a proactive location management mechanism based on the update messages sent by mobile actors to sensors and the actors’ scope limited by Voronoi diagram was proposed.Thus,sensors predicted the movement of actors using Kalman filtering of the previously received updates.Then,an optimal energy-aware forwarding rule based on geographical routing was presented for sensor-actor communication,and the delay of the data delivery process was controlled using the power control and the network congestion was dealed with by forcing multiple actors to share the traffic generated in the event area.Finally,based on the characteristics of multiple concurrent events,a model for actor-actor coordination was proposed to coordinate their movements in order to optimally accomplish the tasks.Performance simulation results show that the proposed cooperative communication mechanism for WSAN can effectively reduce end-to-end delays,energy consumption and percentage of packet drops.     

Adaptive Pull�CPush Based Event Tracking in Wireless Sensor Actor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have attracted significant interest for various scientific, military, and e-health applications. Recently a new class of sensor networks ??sensor/actor networks?? has been introducing new research challenges due to the unique coordination requirements among sensors and actors. In sensor/actor networks, actors are the nodes that have the capability to move in the field, equipped with powerful devices and can respond to the events of interest. With this capability, autonomous operation of the network is possible without a centralized controlling mechanism. This, however, requires the network to apply cooperative mechanism to decide when and how monitoring is done to track the event and how the event will be responded. In this regard, little work has been done in terms of co-existing Push and Pull data flows in the network. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Pull?CPush (APP) based Event Tracking approach that allows sensor-to-actor communication as well as actors coordination in response to the events occurred. APP proposes two models of sensors organization: region-based organization (RAPP) and neighbor-based organization (NAPP) to alert nodes in the vicinity of reported event. APP exploits the mobility of actor nodes to form dynamic responsibility clusters, thus ensuring an event specific response to emergencies. Routing in APP is based on Routing by Adaptive Targeting (RAT), which is a delay-constrained geographical routing protocol. Simulation results reveal significant performance improvement in terms of response time and energy conservation.     

ELPMA: Efficient Localization Algorithm Based Path Planning for Mobile Anchor in Wireless Sensor Network

In operating and managing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and their applications, the high accuracy of localization and the low operating costs are considered the substantial and key issues. The literature is rich in algorithms for localized WSN devices in hostile and unreachable outdoor environment. Majority of the literature considered mobile anchor as one of the solutions in locating sensor nodes. In this situation, the critical issue is the trajectory planning. All algorithms supposed that the mobile anchor should travel following the shortest path to determine the positions of sensor nodes with minimum localization error. A localization algorithm, which is called efficient localization algorithm based path planning for mobile anchors (ELPMA), is proposed. ELPMA is based on a one-mobile anchor moving in adjustable circular trajectory to scan the target area. It considers that the received signal strength indicator is the ranging function to determine the distance between mobile anchor and sensor nodes. ELPMA supposed the mobile anchor starts the motion from the center of the target area. The travelling paths are planned in advance by ELPMA based on the distance measurements between the mobile anchor and the sensor nodes. Simulation results demonstrate that ELPMA has better performance compared to other algorithms based on static path. This performance was evident in the localization accuracy and trajectory planning.     

New path planning model for mobile anchor-assisted localization in wireless sensor networks

As event detection is one of the main purposes of using wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the nodes location is essential to determine the location of that event when it occurs. Many localization models have been proposed in the literature. One of the solutions is to deploy a set of location-aware nodes, called anchors, to exchange information with the other nodes in order to help estimate their own location. Another promising proposal involves replacing these sets of anchors with only one mobile anchor. While this proposal seems to provide favorable results, it brings new challenges. The main challenge is to find an optimal path for the mobile anchor to follow while taking into account the need to provide highly accurate data and more localizable nodes in less time and with less energy. In this paper, we introduced a new static path planning model for mobile anchor-assisted localization in WSNs. Our proposed model guarantees that all nodes are able to receive the localization information, thus, estimate their own location with higher localization accuracy in comparison to similar static models. Moreover, this model overcomes the problem of collinearity and takes into account the metrics of precision and energy consumption as well as accuracy, localization ratio and the path length of the mobile anchor.     

传感网络中基于移动信标的网格扫描定位算法

节点定位是传感网络最基本的技术之一,对此提出一种基于移动信标的网格扫描定位算法(Mobile Beacon Grid-Scan,MBGS)。该算法在网格扫描定位算法基础上,利用一个移动信标巡航整个传感区域,产生大量的虚拟信标,提高网络信标覆盖率,然后普通节点利用这些信标信息减小其可能区域(Estimative Rectangle,ER),并把新可能区域网格坐标质心作为其最新估计坐标。仿真结果表明,与Bounding Box、质心定位算法以及传统的网格扫描定位算法相比,MBGS定位方法的定位精度更高,算法性能更加稳定。     

A Real-Time and Reliable Transport (RT)$^{2}$ Protocol for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are characterized by the collective effort of heterogeneous nodes called sensors and actors. Sensor nodes collect information about the physical world, while actor nodes take action decisions and perform appropriate actions upon the environment. The collaborative operation of sensors and actors brings significant advantages over traditional sensing, including improved accuracy, larger coverage area and timely actions upon the sensed phenomena. However, to realize these potential gains, there is a need for an efficient transport layer protocol that can address the unique communication challenges introduced by the coexistence of sensors and actors. In this paper, a real-time and reliable transport (RT) protocol is presented for WSANs. The objective of the (RT) protocol is to reliably and collaboratively transport event features from the sensor field to the actor nodes with minimum energy dissipation and to timely react to sensor information with a right action. In this respect, the (RT) protocol simultaneously addresses congestion control and timely event transport reliability objectives in WSANs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research effort focusing on real-time and reliable transport protocol for WSANs. Performance evaluations via simulation experiments show that the (RT) protocol achieves high performance in terms of reliable event detection, communication latency and energy consumption in WSANs.     

On the cross-layer interactions between congestion and contention in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSAN) are composed of large number of sensor nodes collaboratively observing a physical phenomenon and relatively smaller number of actor nodes, which act upon the sensed phenomenon. Due to the limited capacity of shared wireless medium and memory restrictions of the sensor nodes, channel contention and network congestion can be experienced during the operation of the network. In fact, the multi-hop nature of WSAN entangles the level of local contention and the experienced network congestion. Therefore, the unique characteristics of WSAN necessitate a comprehensive analysis of the network congestion and contention under various network conditions. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the interactions between contention resolution and congestion control mechanisms as well as the physical layer effects in WSAN. An extensive set of simulations are performed in order to quantify the impacts of several network parameters on the overall network performance. The results of our analysis reveal that the interdependency between network parameters call for adaptive cross-layer mechanisms for efficient data delivery in WSAN.     

事件驱动的带执行器无线传感器网络分簇算法研究

带有执行器的无线传感器网络是指在传统无线传感器网络中加入执行节点,形成传感器节点、执行节点和基站共同构成的三层监控网络。根据执行器在能量、计算能力和感知能力方面的优势,提出建立应用于事件调度的双环分簇算法。算法将执行器连接成双环结构,提升网络在线扩展能力的同时,也为无线传感器网络满足事件驱动构建基础。仿真实验证明,此算法能够有效降低网络能耗,随着节点数目的增加和监控领域的扩大,表现更加凸出。     

Two Fuzzy-Based Systems for Selection of Actor Nodes inWireless Sensor and Actor Networks: A Comparison Study Considering Security Parameter Effect

A group of wireless devices with the ability to sense physical events (sensors) or/and to perform relatively complicated actions (actors), is referred to as Wireless Sensor and Actor Network (WSAN). In WSANs, sensors gather information about the physical events, while actors perform appropriate actions upon the environment, based on the sensed data shared by sensors. In order to provide effective sensing and acting, a distributed local coordination mechanism is necessary among sensors and actors. In this work, we propose and implement two Fuzzy Based Actor Selection Systems (FBASS): FBASS1 and FBASS2. We focus on actor selection problem and implement two fuzzy-based system. The systems decide whether the actor will be selected for the required job or not, based on data supplied by sensors and actual actor condition. We use three input parameters for FBASS1: Type of Required Action (TRA), Distance to Event (DE) and Remaining Power (RP). In FBASS2, we add the Security (SC) parameter as additional parameter. The output parameter for both systems is Actor Selection Decision (ASD). The simulation results show that the proposed systems decide the actor selection in order to have short delays, low energy consumption and proper task assignment. Comparing FBASS1 with FBASS2, the FBASS2 is more complex than FBASS1, because it has more rules in FRB. However, FBASS2 is able to decide secure actor nodes, which makes the system more secure.     

Beacon deployment strategy for guaranteed localization in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, beacons are always treated as infrastructures for localization. After beacons are deployed, non-beacon nodes can be located by simple schemes such as multilateration and multidimensional scaling (MDS). Deploying as many beacons as needed is an efficient way to improve localization accuracy where a global positioning system does not work well or a higher location accuracy is required. With more beacons to be deployed, the configuration of beacons’ positions will have to be done manually. Therefore position auto-configuration using measured distances between these beacons can save a lot of efforts for the deployment. One challenge of this auto-configuration is that the positions should be uniquely determined based on the measured distances. In graph theory, it is a problem of unique realization in which the positions of vertices are determined by edges between them. Addressing this problem is one major aspect of this paper. To determine whether the topology of a network is a unique realization, this paper proposes a novel category of topology named Uniquely Determined Topology, with which edges in a d-dimensional space can be reduced from \(d+1\) to d in each extension, which is less strict and more suitable for beacon deployment. The other aspect of this paper is to improve localization accuracy of the deployed beacons. In MDS and curvilinear component analysis, a shortest-path algorithm is adopted to approximately reconstruct the distance matrix between each two nodes, and our proposed Uniquely Determined Topology has a feature that a distance calculation model can be adopted to replace the shortest-path algorithm, therefore that the local distance matrix can be reconstructed more accurately. Theoretical analysis shows that it has a low computational complexity to determine whether a deployment is a Uniquely Determined Topology. Simulations show the advantages of the improved localization scheme, in that they do not depend on the connectivity level of the networks, and they can provide accurate localization when the estimation accuracy of distances is high.     

一种基于网络密度分簇的移动信标辅助定位方法

现有移动信标辅助定位算法未充分利用网络节点分布信息,存在移动路径过长及信标利用率较低等问题。该文把网络节点分簇、增量定位与移动信标辅助相结合,提出了一种基于网络密度分簇的移动信标辅助定位算法(MBL(ndc))。该算法选择核心密度较大的节点作簇头,采用基于密度可达性的分簇机制把整个网络划分为多个簇内密度相等的簇,并联合使用基于遗传算法的簇头全局路径规划和基于正六边形的簇内局部路径规划方法,得到信标的优化移动路径。当簇头及附近节点完成定位后,升级为信标,采用增量定位方式参与网络其它节点的定位。仿真结果表明,该算法定位精度与基于HILBERT路径的移动信标辅助定位算法相当,而路径长度不到后者的50％。     

Temporal Event Ordering with Fault Tolerance for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

Temporal event ordering is an important issue in wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSAN) since actuators perform correct actions based on correct ordering among the time-related events. For temporal event ordering algorithms, they ensure that events captured from different sensors should be in the order. However, most of temporal ordering algorithms focus on the delay to transmit packets without considering the delay due to data loss. In the latter condition, the temporal ordering among events may be incorrect since some sensed data are lost due to the fail communication link or sensor. However, there is no literature for addressing the fault tolerance under the temporal event ordering of WSAN. Therefore, we propose a temporal event ordering with fault tolerance (TVOFT) in this paper. Differed from other temporal event ordering algorithms, TVOFT uses the routing table of each node with a acknowledge message once time to ensure the correct ordering of the time-related events. Therefore, the overhead of control packets also could be reduced in TVOFT. The simulations results demonstrate that TVOFT has the better correct event ordering rate and the less overhead of control packets than other temporal ordering algorithms even if the communication link or the sensor is fail.     

无线传感器网络的TOF测距方法研究

在无线传感器网络中,测量节点间的距离对节点定位非常关键。在部署无线传感器网络时,节点是随机布撒的,在没有定位机制或者手工测量的情况下,节点的位置信息不能预先知道。提出采用基于窄频RF的TOF测距方法来估算两个节点间的距离,该方法性能较好,但它在无线传感器网络定位技术中尚未普遍应用。采用Jennic JN5148平台在不同的室内外环境中进行TOF测距的实验。结果表明,基于RFTOF的测距方法在室外100m处的测距精度为±4m,在室内10m处的测距精度为±2m,可以很好地满足无线传感器网络定位技术的需要。     

基于EKF的无线传感器网络移动信标定位算法

针对无线传感器网络节点定位精度较低的问题,提出一种基于扩展卡尔曼滤波的移动信标节点定位算法。该算法采用等距三重优化覆盖思想确定虚拟信标分布,利用蚁群算法获取最优遍历路径,同时引入扩展卡尔曼滤波算法以提高节点定位精度。通过对节点通信半径、虚拟信标数目、路径长度、迭代次数等参数分别进行仿真验证,结果表明本文算法定位精度明显优于普通质心定位算法,同时该算法在提高网络覆盖度、降低网络成本等方面也有较大优势。     

Power efficient range-free localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Considering energy consumption, hardware requirements, and the need of high localization accuracy, we proposed a power efficient range-free localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks. In the proposed algorithm, anchor node communicates to unknown nodes only one time by which anchor nodes inform about their coordinates to unknown nodes. By calculating hop-size of anchor nodes at unknown nodes one complete communication between anchor node and unknown node is eliminated which drastically reduce the energy consumption of nodes. Further, unknown node refines estimated hop-size for better estimation of distance from the anchor nodes. Moreover, using average hop-size of anchor nodes, unknown node calculates distance from all anchor nodes. To reduce error propagation, involved in solving for location of unknown node, a new procedure is adopted. Further, unknown node upgrades its location by exploiting the obtained information in solving the system of equations. In mathematical analysis we prove that proposed algorithm has lesser propagation error than distance vector-hop (DV-Hop) and other considered improved DV-Hop algorithms. Simulation experiments show that our proposed algorithm has better localization performance, and is more computationally efficient than DV-Hop and other compared improved DV-Hop algorithms.     

Localization algorithms of Wireless Sensor Networks: a survey

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), localization is one of the most important technologies since it plays a critical role in many applications, e.g., target tracking. If the users cannot obtain the accurate location information, the related applications cannot be accomplished. The main idea in most localization methods is that some deployed nodes (landmarks) with known coordinates (e.g., GPS-equipped nodes) transmit beacons with their coordinates in order to help other nodes localize themselves. In general, the main localization algorithms are classified into two categories: range-based and range-free. In this paper, we reclassify the localization algorithms with a new perspective based on the mobility state of landmarks and unknown nodes, and present a detailed analysis of the representative localization algorithms. Moreover, we compare the existing localization algorithms and analyze the future research directions for the localization algorithms in WSNs.     

Efficient Color-theory-based Dynamic Localization for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Location information is critical to mobile wireless sensor networks (WSN) applications. With the help of location information, for example, routing can be performed more efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel localization approach, Color-theory based Dynamic Localization (CDL), which is based on color theory to exploit localization in mobile WSNs. CDL makes use of the broadcast information, such as locations and RGB values, from all anchors (a small portion of nodes with GPS receivers attached), to help the server to create a location database and assist each sensor node to compute its RGB value. Then, the RGB values of all sensor nodes are sent to the server for localization of the sensor nodes. A unique feature of our color-theory based mechanism is that it can use one color to represent the distances of a sensor node to all anchors. Since CDL is easy to implement and is a centralized approach, it is very suitable for applications that need a centralized server to collect user (sensor) data and monitor user activities, such as community health-care systems and hospital monitoring systems. Evaluation results have shown that for mobile WSNs, the location accuracy of CDL (E-CDL, an enhanced version of CDL) is 40–50% (75–80%) better than that of MCL (Hu, L., & Evans, D. (2004). Localization for mobile sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on mobile computing and networking, pp. 45–57). In addition, we have implemented and validated our E-CDL algorithm on the MICAz Mote Developer’s Kit.     

Sensor Localization under Limited Measurement Capabilities

In this article we survey the latest progress on sensor localization, focusing on distance measurement techniques and localization algorithms for a sensor to determine its own location. We illustrate why inaccurate distance measurements, arising from tight hardware design constraints, raise challenges in sensor localization and how proposed approaches strive to overcome these challenges. We conclude that sensor localization algorithms must be designed to accommodate different application requirements in terms of costs, energy consumption, and localization accuracy     

Distributed localization using mobile beacons in wireless sensor networks

A new distributed node localization algorithm named mobile beacons-improved particle filter (MB-IPF) was proposed. In the algorithm, the mobile nodes equipped with globe position system (GPS) move around in the wireless sensor network (WSN) field based on the Gauss-Markov mobility model, and periodically broadcast the beacon messages. Each unknown node estimates its location in a fully distributed mode based on the received mobile beacons. The localization algorithm is based on the IPF and several refinements, including the proposed weighted centroid algorithm, the residual resampling algorithm, and the markov chain monte carlo (MCMC) method etc., which were also introduced for performance improvement. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm is efficient for most applications.