Application-aware integration of data collection and power management in wireless sensor networks

Sensors are typically deployed to gather data about the physical world and its artifacts for a variety of purposes that range from environment monitoring, control, to data analysis. Since sensors are resource constrained, often sensor data is collected into sensor databases that reside at (more powerful) servers. A natural tradeoff exists between resources (bandwidth, energy) consumed and the quality of data collected at the server. Blindly transmitting sensor updates at a fixed periodicity to the server results in a suboptimal solution due to the differences in stability of sensor values and due to the varying application needs that impose different quality requirements across sensors. In order to adapt to these variations while at the same time optimizing the energy consumption of sensors, this paper proposes three different models and corresponding data collection protocols. We analyze all three models with a Markov state machine formulation, and either derive closed forms for the operation point of the data collection application or suggest algorithms for estimating this operating point to achieve a minimal energy consumption. We observe that the operating point depends on environmental characteristics and application quality requirements, which the proposed algorithms aim to accommodate. Our experimental results show significant energy savings compared to the naive approach to data collection.     

Energy-efficient cooperative data aggregation for wireless sensor networks

Recently, cooperative communication mechanism is shown to be a promising technology to improve the transmit diversity only by a single transceiver antenna. Using this communication paradigm, multiple source nodes are able to coordinate their transmissions so as to obtain energy savings. As data aggregation is one of the most important operations in wireless sensor networks, this paper studies the energy-efficient data aggregation problem through cooperative communication. We first define the cooperative data aggregation (CDA) problem, and formally prove that this problem is NP-Hard. Due to the difficult nature of this problem, we propose a heuristic algorithm MCT for cooperative data aggregation. The theoretical analysis shows that this algorithm can reach the approximate performance ratio of 2. Moreover, the distributed implementation DMCT of the algorithm is also described. We prove that both centralized and distributed algorithms can construct the same topology for cooperative data aggregation. The experimental simulations show that the proposed algorithms will decrease the power consumption by about 12.5% and 66.3% compared with PEDAP and PEGASIS algorithms respectively.     

Direction-based adaptive data propagation for heterogeneous sensor mobility

We consider sensor networks where the sensor nodes are attached on entities that move in a highly dynamic, heterogeneous manner. To capture this mobility diversity we introduce a new network parameter, the direction-aware mobility level, which measures how fast and close each mobile node is expected to get to the data destination (the sink). We then provide local, distributed data dissemination protocols that adaptively exploit the node mobility to improve performance. In particular, “high” mobility is used as a low cost replacement for data dissemination (due to the ferrying of data), while in the case of “low” mobility either (a) data propagation redundancy is increased (when highly mobile neighbors exist) or (b) long-distance data transmissions are used (when the entire neighborhood is of low mobility) to accelerate data dissemination toward the sink. An extensive performance comparison to relevant methods from the state of the art demonstrates significant improvements, i.e. latency is reduced by even four times while keeping energy dissipation and delivery success at very satisfactory levels.     

Enabling energy-efficient and lossy-aware data compression in wireless sensor networks by multi-objective evolutionary optimization

Nodes of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are typically powered by batteries with a limited capacity. Thus, energy is a primary constraint in the design and deployment of WSNs. Since radio communication is in general the main cause of power consumption, the different techniques proposed in the literature to improve energy efficiency have mainly focused on limiting transmission/reception of data, for instance, by adopting data compression and/or aggregation. The limited resources available in a sensor node demand, however, the development of specifically designed algorithms. To this aim, we propose an approach to perform lossy compression on single node based on a differential pulse code modulation scheme with quantization of the differences between consecutive samples. Since different combinations of the quantization process parameters determine different trade-offs between compression performance and information loss, we exploit a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to generate a set of combinations of these parameters corresponding to different optimal trade-offs. The user can therefore choose the combination with the most suitable trade-off for the specific application. We tested our lossy compression approach on three datasets collected by real WSNs. We show that our approach can achieve significant compression ratios despite negligible reconstruction errors. Further, we discuss how our approach outperforms LTC, a lossy compression algorithm purposely designed to be embedded in sensor nodes, in terms of compression rate and complexity.     

Fault-tolerant and efficient data propagation in wireless sensor networks using local,additional network information

We propose a new data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks, that basically pulls some additional knowledge about the network in order to subsequently improve data forwarding towards the sink. This extra information is still local, limited and obtained in a distributed manner. This extra knowledge is acquired by only a small fraction of sensors thus the extra energy cost only marginally affects the overall protocol efficiency. The new protocol has low latency and manages to propagate data successfully even in the case of low densities. Furthermore, we study in detail the effect of failures and show that our protocol is very robust. In particular, we implement and evaluate the protocol using large scale simulation, showing that it significantly outperforms well known relevant solutions in the state of the art.     

Topology control for delay-constraint data collection in wireless sensor networks

Data collection is one of the most important operations in wireless sensor networks. Many practical applications require the real-time data transmission, such as monitoring, tracking, etc. In this paper, we import and define the topology control problem for delay-constraint data collection (TDDC), and then formalize this problem into an integer programming problem. As NP-Hardness of this problem, we present a load-aware power-increased topology control algorithm (namely LPTC) to heuristically solve the problem. The theoretical analysis shows that this algorithm can reach O(1)-approximation ratio for the linear networks. And we also analyze the impact of the delay-constraint on the worst-case for the planar networks. Moreover, this paper designs two localized algorithms, called as SDEL and DDEL, based on the area division for TDDC problem. The experimental results show that LPTC algorithm can save at least 17% power consumptions compared with HBH algorithm in many situations.     

Accelerated collection of sensor data by mobility-enabled topology ranks

We study the problem of fast and energy-efficient data collection of sensory data using a mobile sink, in wireless sensor networks in which both the sensors and the sink move. Motivated by relevant applications, we focus on dynamic sensory mobility and heterogeneous sensor placement. Our approach basically suggests to exploit the sensor motion to adaptively propagate information based on local conditions (such as high placement concentrations), so that the sink gradually “learns” the network and accordingly optimizes its motion. Compared to relevant solutions in the state of the art (such as the blind random walk, biased walks, and even optimized deterministic sink mobility), our method significantly reduces latency (the improvement ranges from 40% for uniform placements, to 800% for heterogeneous ones), while also improving the success rate and keeping the energy dissipation at very satisfactory levels.     

Energy-efficient forwarding in wireless sensor networks

For maximizing the energy efficiency in a wireless network, we propose two forwarding schemes termed single-link and multi-link energy-efficient forwarding that tradeoff delivery ratios against energy costs. Multi-link forwarding improves the network performance substantially by addressing multiple receivers at once during the packet forwarding process. If the first forwarding node does not receive a packet correctly, other nodes may act as backup nodes and perform the forwarding instead. By means of mathematical analyses, we derive how the energy efficiency of a forwarding path can be computed and how a forwarding tree is established. Routing cycles are explicitly taken into account and prevented by means of sequence numbers. Simulations and real-world experiments provide a comparison to other reference strategies, showing a superior performance of our forwarding scheme in terms of energy efficiency.     

A simple, least-time, and energy-efficient routing protocol with one-level data aggregation for wireless sensor networks

The area of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is currently attractive in the research community area due to its applications in diverse fields such as defense security, civilian applications and medical research. Routing is a serious issue in WSN due to the use of computationally-constrained and resource-constrained micro-sensors. These constraints prohibit the deployment of traditional routing protocols designed for other ad hoc wireless networks. Any routing protocol designed for use in WSN should be reliable, energy-efficient and should increase the lifetime of the network. We propose a simple, least-time, energy-efficient routing protocol with one-level data aggregation that ensures increased life time for the network. The proposed protocol was compared with popular ad hoc and sensor network routing protocols, viz., AODV ( [35] and [12]), DSR (Johnson et al., 2001), DSDV (Perkins and Bhagwat, 1994), DD (Intanagonwiwat et al., 2000) and MCF (Ye et al., 2001). It was observed that the proposed protocol outperformed them in throughput, latency, average energy consumption and average network lifetime. The proposed protocol uses absolute time and node energy as the criteria for routing, this ensures reliability and congestion avoidance.     

Energy optimal data propagation in wireless sensor networks

We propose an algorithm to compute the optimal parameters of a probabilistic data propagation algorithm for wireless sensor networks (WSN). The probabilistic data propagation algorithm we consider was introduced in previous work, and it is known that this algorithm, when used with adequate parameters, balances the energy consumption and increases the lifespan of the WSN. However, we show that in the general case achieving energy balance may not be possible. We propose a centralized algorithm to compute the optimal parameters of the probabilistic data propagation algorithm, and prove that these parameters maximize the lifespan of the network even when it is not possible to achieve energy balance. Compared to previous work, our contribution is the following: (a) we give a formal definition of an optimal data propagation algorithm: an algorithm maximizing the lifespan of the network. (b) We find a simple necessary and sufficient condition for the data propagation algorithm to be optimal. (c) We constructively prove that there exists a choice of parameters optimizing the probabilistic data propagation algorithm. (d) We provide a centralized algorithm to compute these optimal parameters, thus enabling their use in a WSN. (e) We extend previous work by considering the energy consumption per sensor, instead of the consumption per slice, and propose a spreading technique to balance the energy among sensors of a same slice. The technique is numerically validated by simulating a WSN accomplishing a data monitoring task and propagating data using the probabilistic data propagation algorithm with optimal parameters.     

Practical data compression in wireless sensor networks: A survey

Power consumption is a critical problem affecting the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. A number of techniques have been proposed to solve this issue, such as energy-efficient medium access control or routing protocols. Among those proposed techniques, the data compression scheme is one that can be used to reduce transmitted data over wireless channels. This technique leads to a reduction in the required inter-node communication, which is the main power consumer in wireless sensor networks. In this article, a comprehensive review of existing data compression approaches in wireless sensor networks is provided. First, suitable sets of criteria are defined to classify existing techniques as well as to determine what practical data compression in wireless sensor networks should be. Next, the details of each classified compression category are described. Finally, their performance, open issues, limitations and suitable applications are analyzed and compared based on the criteria of practical data compression in wireless sensor networks.     

Data quality and query cost in pervasive sensing systems

This research is motivated by large-scale pervasive sensing applications. We examine the benefits and costs of caching data for such applications. We propose and evaluate several approaches to querying for, and then caching data in a sensor field data server. We show that for some application requirements (i.e., when delay drives data quality), policies that emulate cache hits by computing and returning approximate values for sensor data yield a simultaneous quality improvement and cost saving. This win–win is because when system delay is sufficiently important, the benefit to both query cost and data quality achieved by using approximate values outweighs the negative impact on quality due to the approximation. In contrast, when data accuracy drives quality, a linear trade-off between query cost and data quality emerges. We also identify caching and lookup policies for which the sensor field query rate is bounded when servicing an arbitrary workload of user queries. This upper bound is achieved by having multiple user queries share the cost of a single sensor field query. Finally, we demonstrate that our results are robust to the manner in which the environment being monitored changes using models for two different sensing systems.     

Auction-based adaptive sensor activation algorithm for target tracking in wireless sensor networks

Due to the severe resource constraints in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), designing an efficient target tracking algorithm for WSNs in terms of energy efficiency and high tracking quality becomes a challenging issue. WSNs usually provide centralized information, e.g., the locations and directions of a target, choosing sensors around the target, etc. However, some ready strategies may not be used directly because of high communication costs to get the responses for tracking tasks from a central server and low quality of tracking. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed algorithm, an auction-based adaptive sensor activation algorithm (AASA), for target tracking in WSNs. Clusters are formed ahead of the target movements in an interesting way where the process of cluster formation is due to a predicted region (PR) and cluster members are chosen from the PR via an auction mechanism. On the basis of PR calculation, only the nodes in the PR are activated and the rest of the nodes remain in the sleeping state. To make a trade-off between energy efficiency and tracking quality, the radius of PR and the number of nodes are adaptively adjusted according to current tracking quality. Instead of fixed interval (usually used in existing work), tracking interval is also dynamically adapted. Extensive simulation results, compared to existing work, show that AASA achieves high performance in terms of quality of tracking, energy efficiency, and network lifetime.     

An energy-efficient protocol for data gathering and aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Data gathering is a major function of many applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The most important issue in designing a data gathering algorithm is how to save energy of sensor nodes while meeting the requirement of applications/users such as sensing area coverage. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical clustering protocol (DEEG) for long-lived sensor network. DEEG achieves a good performance in terms of lifetime by minimizing energy consumption for in-network communications and balancing the energy load among all the nodes, the proposed protocol achieves a good performance in terms of network lifetime. DEEG can also handle the energy hetergenous capacities and guarantee that out-network communications always occur in the subregion with high energy reserved. Furthermore, it introduces a simple but efficient approach to cope with the area coverage problem. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol using a simple temperature sensing application. Simulation results show that our protocol significantly outperforms LEACH and PEGASIS in terms of network lifetime and the amount of data gathered.

Distributed clustering algorithms for data-gathering in wireless mobile sensor networks

One critical issue in wireless sensor networks is how to gather sensed information in an energy-efficient way since the energy is a scarce resource in a sensor node. Cluster-based architecture is an effective architecture for data-gathering in wireless sensor networks. However, in a mobile environment, the dynamic topology poses the challenge to design an energy-efficient data-gathering protocol. In this paper, we consider the cluster-based architecture and provide distributed clustering algorithms for mobile sensor nodes which minimize the energy dissipation for data-gathering in a wireless mobile sensor network. There are two steps in the clustering algorithm: cluster-head election step and cluster formation step. We first propose two distributed algorithms for cluster-head election. Then, by considering the impact of node mobility, we provide a mechanism to have a sensor node select a proper cluster-head to join for cluster formation. Our clustering algorithms will achieve the following three objectives: (1) there is at least one cluster-head elected, (2) the number of cluster-heads generated is uniform, and (3) all the generated clusters have the same cluster size. Last, we validate our algorithms through an extensive experimental analysis with Random Walk Mobility (RWM) model, Random Direction Mobility (RDM) model, and a Simple Mobility (SM) model as well as present our findings.     

A distributed energy-efficient clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

Minimizing energy dissipation and maximizing network lifetime are among the central concerns when designing applications and protocols for sensor networks. Clustering has been proven to be energy-efficient in sensor networks since data routing and relaying are only operated by cluster heads. Besides, cluster heads can process, filter and aggregate data sent by cluster members, thus reducing network load and alleviating the bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed clustering algorithm where cluster heads are elected following a three-way message exchange between each sensor and its neighbors. Sensor’s eligibility to be elected cluster head is based on its residual energy and its degree. Our protocol has a message exchange complexity of O(1) and a worst-case convergence time complexity of O(N). Simulations show that our algorithm outperforms EESH, one of the most recently published distributed clustering algorithms, in terms of network lifetime and ratio of elected cluster heads.     

Distributed anomaly detection for industrial wireless sensor networks based on fuzzy data modelling

Modern infrastructure increasingly depends on large computerized systems for their reliable operation. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are being deployed to monitor and control large scale distributed infrastructures (e.g. power plants, water distribution systems). A recent trend is to incorporate Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to sense and gather data. However, due to the broadcast nature of the network and inherent limitations in the sensor nodes themselves, they are vulnerable to different types of security attacks. Given the critical aspects of the underlying infrastructure it is an extremely important research challenge to provide effective methods to detect malicious activities on these networks. This paper proposes a robust and scalable mechanism that aims to detect malicious anomalies accurately and efficiently using distributed in-network processing in a hierarchical framework. Unsupervised data partitioning is performed distributively adapting fuzzy c-means clustering in an incremental model. Non-parametric and non-probabilistic anomaly detection is performed through fuzzy membership evaluations and thresholds on observed inter-cluster distances. Robust thresholds are determined adaptively using second order statistical knowledge at each evaluation stage. Extensive experiments were performed and the results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves high detection accuracy compared to existing data clustering approaches with more than 96% less communication overheads opposed to a centralized approach.     

Secure and energy-efficient data aggregation with malicious aggregator identification in wireless sensor networks

Data aggregation in wireless sensor networks is employed to reduce the communication overhead and prolong the network lifetime. However, an adversary may compromise some sensor nodes, and use them to forge false values as the aggregation result. Previous secure data aggregation schemes have tackled this problem from different angles. The goal of those algorithms is to ensure that the Base Station (BS) does not accept any forged aggregation results. But none of them have tried to detect the nodes that inject into the network bogus aggregation results. Moreover, most of them usually have a communication overhead that is (at best) logarithmic per node. In this paper, we propose a secure and energy-efficient data aggregation scheme that can detect the malicious nodes with a constant per node communication overhead. In our solution, all aggregation results are signed with the private keys of the aggregators so that they cannot be altered by others. Nodes on each link additionally use their pairwise shared key for secure communications. Each node receives the aggregation results from its parent (sent by the parent of its parent) and its siblings (via its parent node), and verifies the aggregation result of the parent node. Theoretical analysis on energy consumption and communication overhead accords with our comparison based simulation study over random data aggregation trees.     

无线传感器网络簇首提取压缩算法

对矢量数据压缩算法中DP压缩算法在引入无线传感器网络的同时进行了改进,针对压缩过程中对数据的扫描次数问题,提出簇首提取压缩算法。该算法中“簇首”即为“数据簇首”,簇首提取压缩算法设定步长减少压缩过程中对数据的扫描次数,并采用最佳曲线拟合方法对监测数据点做直线优化拟合,根据数据间的依附关系,将体现整体特征的簇首数据进行提取;同时,对非簇首数据进行子群划分。仿真结果表明,簇首提取压缩算法程序更为简单,对大波动数据有较好的簇首提取效果,减少了网络中数据的传输量,有效地节省了整个网络的能量消耗。