Design and analysis of novel quorum-based sink location service scheme in wireless sensor networks

Geographic routing in wireless sensor networks requires sources nodes to be aware of the location information of sinks to send their data. To provide the sink location service, quorum-based schemes have been proposed, which exploit crossing points between a quorum of a sink location announcement (SLA) message from a sink and a quorum of a sink location query (SLQ) message from a source node. For guaranteeing at least one crossing point in irregular sensor networks with void areas or irregular boundaries, the previous schemes however collect and flood the network boundary information or forward a SLA and SLQ message along the whole network boundary. In this paper, we design a novel quorum-based sink location service scheme that exploits circle and line quorums, which does not require the network boundary information and send a SLA and SLQ message along the whole network boundary. In the proposed scheme, a source node sends a SLQ message to the network center and sends another SLQ message to an edge node in the network boundary, thus generating a SLQ line quorum. On the other hand, a sink node sends a SLA message along a circle path whose center is the network center, thus forming a SLQ circle quorum. By this way, it is guaranteed that the SLQ and SLA quorums have at least one crossing point in irregular sensor networks. Both numerical analysis and extensive simulation results verify that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of the delivery distance, the delivery hop count, and the energy consumption for providing sink location service.     

Cross-layer traffic analysis countermeasures against adaptive attackers of wireless sensor networks

Wireless Networks - In most Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications the sensor nodes forward their measurements to a central base station (BS). The unique role of the BS makes it a natural...     

Relative location estimation in wireless sensor networks

Self-configuration in wireless sensor networks is a general class of estimation problems that we study via the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB). Specifically, we consider sensor location estimation when sensors measure received signal strength (RSS) or time-of-arrival (TOA) between themselves and neighboring sensors. A small fraction of sensors in the network have a known location, whereas the remaining locations must be estimated. We derive CRBs and maximum-likelihood estimators (MLEs) under Gaussian and log-normal models for the TOA and RSS measurements, respectively. An extensive TOA and RSS measurement campaign in an indoor office area illustrates MLE performance. Finally, relative location estimation algorithms are implemented in a wireless sensor network testbed and deployed in indoor and outdoor environments. The measurements and testbed experiments demonstrate 1-m RMS location errors using TOA, and 1- to 2-m RMS location errors using RSS.     

EMS: Efficient mobile sink scheduling in wireless sensor networks

Sink scheduling, in the form of scheduling multiple sinks among the available sink sites to relieve the level of traffic burden, is shown to be a promising scheme in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the problem of maximizing the network lifetime via sink scheduling remains quite a challenge since routing issues are tightly coupled. Previous approaches on this topic either suffer from poor performance due to a lack of joint considerations, or are based on relaxed constraints. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to fill in the research blanks. First, we develop a novel notation Placement Pattern (PP) to bound time-varying routes with the placement of sinks. This bounding technique transforms the problem from time domain into pattern domain, and thus, significantly decreases the problem complexity. Then, we formulate this optimization in a pattern-based way and create an efficient Column Generation (CG) based approach to solve it. Simulations not only demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm but also substantiate the importance of sink mobility for energy-constrained WSNs.     

Band-based geocasting for mobile sink groups in wireless sensor networks

This paper studies on delivery-guaranteed and effective data dissemination for mobile sink groups in wireless sensor networks. A mobile sink group denotes a set of tightly coupled mobile sinks for team collaborations such as a team of firefighters and a group of solders. The mobile sinks have a group movement feature. They thus randomly move in personal spaces as well as collectively move together as a single entity. To support such group mobility, previous studies provide circle-based protocols determining successive circular areas of a group continuously moving, and then propagate data in the areas by flooding. However, since a group is still moving during decision of each circle, they may cause asynchrony between circles and actual group positions. Eventually, it could harm reachability and energy-efficiency. We therefore propose a novel data dissemination protocol using motion properties of a mobile sink group: slowly varying and streamlike movement. By the slowly varying constraint, the protocol predictively and effectively delivers data to a group through a band of sensor nodes located in front of the streamlike trajectory of the group.     

Controlled sink mobility for prolonging wireless sensor networks lifetime

This paper demonstrates the advantages of using controlled mobility in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for increasing their lifetime, i.e., the period of time the network is able to provide its intended functionalities. More specifically, for WSNs that comprise a large number of statically placed sensor nodes transmitting data to a collection point (the sink), we show that by controlling the sink movements we can obtain remarkable lifetime improvements. In order to determine sink movements, we first define a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) analytical model whose solution determines those sink routes that maximize network lifetime. Our contribution expands further by defining the first heuristics for controlled sink movements that are fully distributed and localized. Our Greedy Maximum Residual Energy (GMRE) heuristic moves the sink from its current location to a new site as if drawn toward the area where nodes have the highest residual energy. We also introduce a simple distributed mobility scheme (Random Movement or RM) according to which the sink moves uncontrolled and randomly throughout the network. The different mobility schemes are compared through extensive ns2-based simulations in networks with different nodes deployment, data routing protocols, and constraints on the sink movements. In all considered scenarios, we observe that moving the sink always increases network lifetime. In particular, our experiments show that controlling the mobility of the sink leads to remarkable improvements, which are as high as sixfold compared to having the sink statically (and optimally) placed, and as high as twofold compared to uncontrolled mobility. Stefano Basagni holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas (December 2001) and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Milano, Italy (May 1998). He received his B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1991. Since Winter 2002 he is on faculty at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, in Boston, MA. From August 2000 to January 2002 he was professor of computer science at the Department of Computer Science of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Basagni’s current research interests concern research and implementation aspects of mobile networks and wireless communications systems, Bluetooth and sensor networking, definition and performance evaluation of network protocols and theoretical and practical aspects of distributed algorithms. Dr. Basagni has published over four dozens of referred technical papers and book chapters. He is also co-editor of two books. Dr. Basagni served as a guest editor of the special issue of the Journal on Special Topics in Mobile Networking and Applications (MONET) on Multipoint Communication in Wireless Mobile Networks, of the special issue on mobile ad hoc networks of the Wiley’s Interscience’s Wireless Communications & Mobile Networks journal, and of the Elsevier’s journal Algorithmica on algorithmic aspects of mobile computing and communications. Dr. Basagni serves as a member of the editorial board and of the technical program committee of ACM and IEEE journals and international conferences. He is a senior member of the ACM (including the ACM SIGMOBILE), senior member of the IEEE (Computer and Communication societies), and member of ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education). Alessio Carosi received the M.S. degree “summa cum laude” in Computer Science in 2004 from Rome University “La Sapienza.” He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Rome University “La Sapienza.” His research interests include protocols for ad hoc and sensor networks, underwater systems and delay tolerant networking. Emanuel Melachrinoudis received the Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. He is currently the Director of Industrial Engineering and Associate Chairman of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. His research interests are in the areas of network optimization and multiple criteria optimization with applications to telecommunication networks, distribution networks, location and routing. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Operational Research. He has published in journals such as Management Science, Transportation Science, Networks, European Journal of Operational Research, Naval Research Logistics and IIE Transactions. Chiara Petrioli received the Laurea degree “summa cum laude” in computer science in 1993, and the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering in 1998, both from Rome University “La Sapienza,” Italy. She is currently Associate Professor with the Computer Science Department at Rome University “La Sapienza.” Her current work focuses on ad hoc and sensor networks, Delay Tolerant Networks, Personal Area Networks, Energy-conserving protocols, QoS in IP networks and Content Delivery Networks where she contributed around sixty papers published in prominent international journals and conferences. Prior to Rome University she was research associate at Politecnico di Milano and was working with the Italian Space agency (ASI) and Alenia Spazio. Dr. Petrioli was guest editor of the special issue on “Energy-conserving protocols in wireless Networks” of the ACM/Kluwer Journal on Special Topics in Mobile Networking and Applications (ACM MONET) and is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, the ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks journal, the Wiley InterScience Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing journal and the Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks journal. She has served in the organizing committee and technical program committee of several leading conferences in the area of networking and mobile computing including ACM Mobicom, ACM Mobihoc, IEEE ICC,IEEE Globecom. She is member of the steering committee of ACM Sensys and of the international conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services (Mobiquitous) and serves as member of the ACM SIGMOBILE executive committee. Dr. Petrioli was a Fulbright scholar. She is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Z. Maria Wang received her Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering with the highest honor from Beijing Institute of Light Industry in China, her M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering/Operations Research from Dalhousie University, Canada and her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering/Operations Research from Northeastern University, Boston. She served as a R&D Analyst for General Dynamics. Currently MS. Wang serves as an Optimization Analyst with Nomis Solutions, Inc.     

Distributed data storage solution under sink failures in wireless sensor networks

In challenging environment, sensory data must be stored inside the network in case of sink failures, we need to redistribute overflowing data items from the depleted storage source nodes to sensor nodes with available storage space and residual energy. We design a distributed energy efficient data storage algorithm named distributed data preservation with priority (D²P²). This algorithm takes both data redistribution costs and data retrieval costs into account and combines these two problems into a single problem. D²P² can effectively realize data redistribution by using cooperative communication among sensor nodes. In order to solve the redistribution contention problem, we introduce the concept of data priority, which can avoid contention consultations between source nodes and reduce energy consumption. Finally, we verify the performance of the proposed algorithm by both theory and simulations. We demonstrate that D²P²'s performance is close to the optimal centralized algorithm in terms of energy consumption and shows superiority in terms of data preservation time.     

无线传感器网络混合定位技术研究

在大规模复杂无线传感器网络中往往采用多种节点定位技术,在此结合现有无线传感器定位技术的现状,提出了一种混合定位技术以实现不同定位方法之间的互补。一方面利用RSSI定位弥补TDOA定位覆盖范围小的缺点;另一方面将测距信息引入到非测距定位DV—Hop算法中,用RSSI测距模型来提高DV-Hop算法中定位节点与信标节点间有效距离的精度。实验结果表明,该混合定位技术实现了TDOA,RSSI以及DV-HOP等定位技术的融合,有效地提高了复杂大规模无线传感器网络的节点定位精度。     

Secure probabilistic location verification in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks

Security plays an important role in the ability to deploy and retrieve trustworthy data from a wireless sensor network. Location verification is an effective defense against attacks which take advantage of a lack, or compromise, of location information. In this work, a secure probabilistic location verification method for randomly deployed dense sensor networks is proposed. The proposed Probabilistic Location Verification (PLV) algorithm leverages the probabilistic dependence of the number of hops a broadcast packet traverses to reach a destination and the Euclidean distance between the source and the destination. A small number of verifier nodes are used to determine the plausibility of the claimed location, which is represented by a real number between zero and one. Using the calculated plausibility metric, it is possible to create arbitrary number of trust levels in the location claimed. Simulation studies verify that the proposed solution provides high performance in face of various types of attacks.     

无线传感器网络节点定位技术综述

无线传感器网络在许多领域有着重要的科研和使用价值,网络中传感器节点自身定位可为无线传感器网络的很多应用提供基础信息,是重要研究方向之一.从无线传感器网络节点定位技术的研究意义与应用价值出发,介绍了节点定位技术的基本原理与方法,并讨论了定位算法的评价标准,最后对节点定位技术的发展方向进行了展望.     

Improving wireless sensor networks performance through epidemic model

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) encounter a critical challenge of ‘Network Security’ due to extreme operational constraints. The origin of the challenge begins with the entry of worms in the wireless network. Just one infected node is enough to spread the worms across the entire network. The infected node rapidly infects the neighbouring nodes in an unstoppable manner. In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed based on epidemic theory. It is an improvement of the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered-Susceptible (SIRS) and Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Susceptible (SEIS) model. We propose Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered-Susceptible (SEIRS) model that overcomes the drawbacks of existing models. The proposed ameliorated model includes a finite communication radius and the associated node density. We obtain basic reproduction number which determines the local and global propagation dynamics of worm in the WSNs. Also, we deduce expression for threshold for node density and communication radius. We investigated the control mechanism against worm propagation. We compare the proposed model with various existing models and evaluate its performance on the basis of various performance metrics. The study confirms melioration in the vital aspects (security, network reliability, transmission efficiency, energy efficiency) for WSNs. The proposed SEIRS model provides an improved technique to restraint worms’ transmission in comparison to the existing models.     

Sink location privacy protection under direction attack in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have been widely deployed in military and civilian applications. Due to the nature of the sensor network, it is easy for an adversary to trace the movement of packets and get the sink location. Many ways have been proposed to deal with this problem, most of them provide path diversity. But these techniques always expose direction information. Once adversaries have got the direction information, they can launch a direction attack by deducing the direction of the sink and choosing right paths to trace. To cope with the direction attack, we present an improved scheme based on injecting fake packets and random walk of real packets. In this scheme, real packets do a random walk to hide direction information at a special phase, fake packets are injected in intersection nodes of two or more shortest paths, which can lead adversaries to fake paths. Privacy analysis shows that our scheme has a good performance on protecting sink location. We also examine the delivery time, energy consumption and safe time by simulations.     

On providing location privacy for mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks

A common practice in sensor networks is to collect sensing data and report them to the sinks or to some pre-defined data rendezvous points via multi-hop communications. Attackers may locate the sink easily by reading the destination field in the packet header or predicting the arrival of the sink at the rendezvous points, which opens up vulnerabilities to location privacy of the sinks. In this paper, we propose a random data collection scheme to protect the location privacy of mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks. Data are forwarded along random paths and stored at the intermediate nodes probabilistically in the network. The sinks will move around randomly to collect data from the local nodes occasionally, which prevents the attackers from predicting their locations and movements. We analyze different kind of attacks threatening the location privacy of the sinks in sensor networks. We also evaluate the delivery rate, data collection delay and protection strength of our scheme by both analysis and simulations. Both analytical and simulation results show that our scheme can protect location privacy of mobile sinks effectively, while providing satisfactory data collection services.     

A myopic mobile sink migration strategy for maximizing lifetime of wireless sensor networks

Network lifetime maximization is challenging particularly for large-scale wireless sensor networks. The sensor nodes near the sink node tend to suffer high energy consumption due to heavy traffic relay operations, becoming vulnerable to energy depletion. The rationale of the sink mobility approach is that as the sink node moves around, such risk of energy depletion at some nodes can be alleviated. In this paper, we first obtain the optimal mobile sink sojourning pattern by solving a linear programming model and then we mathematically analyze why the optimal solution exhibits such sojourning pattern. We use the insights from this analysis to design a simple practical heuristic algorithm for sink mobility, which utilizes only local information. Our heuristic is very different from the existing algorithms which often use the traffic volume as the main decision factor, in that we consider the variance of residual energy of neighboring sensor nodes. The simulation results show that our scheme achieves near-optimal network lifetime even with the relatively low moving speed of the mobile sink.     

Energy efficient dispatch strategy for the dual-functional mobile sink in wireless rechargeable sensor networks

Scavenging energy from radio-frequency (RF) signals has drawn significant attention in recent years. By introducing the technology of RF energy harvesting into wireless sensor networks, a new type of network named mobile data gathering based wireless rechargeable sensor network (MGWRSN) is considered in this paper. In the MGWRSN, a dual-functional mobile sink (MS) which has the abilities of data collecting and RF energy generating is employed. Data sensed by sensor nodes is gathered at several selected head nodes (HNs). Through using the RF energy supplied by the MS, the HNs deliver the gathered data to the MS arriving at the corresponding rendezvous points (RPs). In our works, the network energy consumption model of the MGWRSN is built, and the energy efficient dispatch strategy for the MS is studied, aiming at cutting down the total network energy consumption. For the simplest case, i.e., the one-HN MGWRSN, the optimal location of the RP is provided to minimize the total network energy consumption. After that, the researches are extended into the case of multi-HN MGWRSN and a heuristic dispatch strategy named HEEDS is proposed. Theoretical analysis and numerical results show that: (1) in the one-HN MGWRSN, the optimal location of the RP is close related to the data bulk to be transmitted, the unit mobility energy cost, the required bit error rate, the modulation scheme, and the departure position of the MS; (2) comparing with the existing algorithm WRP which directly dispatches the MS to the locations of HNs to collect data, the proposed strategy HEEDS is shown to be more energy efficient. Moreover, when a high energy transfer power is available at the MS, HEEDS renders shorter packet delay compared to WRP.     

Upstream congestion control in wireless sensor networks through cross-layer optimization

Congestion in wireless sensor networks not only causes packet loss, but also leads to excessive energy consumption. Therefore congestion in WSNs needs to be controlled in order to prolong system lifetime. In addition, this is also necessary to improve fairness and provide better quality of service (QoS), which is required by multimedia applications in wireless multimedia sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a novel upstream congestion control protocol for WSNs, called priority-based congestion control protocol (PCCP). Unlike existing work, PCCP innovatively measures congestion degree as the ratio of packet inter-arrival time along over packet service time. PCCP still introduced node priority index to reflect the importance of each sensor node. Based on the introduced congestion degree and node priority index, PCCP utilizes a cross-layer optimization and imposes a hop-by-hop approach to control congestion. We have demonstrated that PCCP achieves efficient congestion control and flexible weighted fairness for both single-path and multi-path routing, as a result this leads to higher energy efficiency and better QoS in terms of both packet loss rate and delay.     

Virtual grid-based rendezvous point and sojourn location selection for energy and delay efficient data acquisition in wireless sensor networks with mobile sink

Wireless Networks - Rendezvous points (RPs) based data acquisition methods are widely accepted as the solution for data acquisition delay/latency problem. In these methods, RPs are a subset of...     

Performance analysis of relative location estimation for multihop wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we present new analytical, simulated, and experimental results on the performance of relative location estimation in multihop wireless sensor networks. With relative location, node locations are estimated based on the collection of peer-to-peer ranges between nodes and their neighbors using a priori knowledge of the location of a small subset of nodes, called reference nodes. This paper establishes that when applying relative location to multihop networks the resulting location accuracy has a fundamental upper bound that is determined by such system parameters as the number of hops and the number of links to the reference nodes. This is in contrast to the case of single-hop or fully connected systems where increasing the node density results in continuously increasing location accuracy. More specifically, in multihop networks for a fixed number of hops, as sensor nodes are added to the network the overall location accuracy improves converging toward a fixed asymptotic value that is determined by the total number of links to the reference nodes, whereas for a fixed number of links to the reference nodes, the location accuracy of a node decreases the greater the number of hops from the reference nodes. Analytical expressions are derived from one-dimensional networks for these fundamental relationships that are also validated in two-dimensional and three-dimensional networks with simulation and UWB measurement results.