Hierarchical location service for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a mobile sink can help eliminate the hotspot effect in the vicinity of the sink, which can balance the traffic load in the network and thus improve the network performance. Location‐based routing is an effective routing paradigm for supporting sink mobility in WSNs with mobile sinks (mWSNs). To support efficient location‐based routing, scalable location service must be provided to advertise the location information of mobile sinks in an mWSN. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical location service for supporting location‐based routing in mWSNs. The proposed location service divides an mWSN into a grid structure and exploits the characteristics of static sensors and mobile sinks in selecting location servers. It can build, maintain, and update the grid‐spaced network structure via a simple hashing function. To reduce the location update cost, a hierarchy structure is built by choosing a subset of location servers in the network to store the location information of mobile sinks. The simulation results show that the proposed location service can significantly reduce the communication overhead caused by sink mobility while maintaining high routing performance, and scales well in terms of network size and sink number. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of Deployment Pattern and Routing Scheme on the Lifetime in Multi-Sink Wireless Sensor Network

Extensive use of sensor and actuator networks in many real-life applications introduced several new performance metrics at the node and network level. Since wireless sensor nodes have significant battery constraints, therefore, energy efficiency, as well as network lifetime, are among the most significant performance metrics to measure the effectiveness of given network architecture. This work investigates the performance of an event-based data delivery model using a multipath routing scheme for a wireless sensor network with multiple sink nodes. This routing algorithm follows a sink initiated route discovery process with the location information of the source nodes already known to the sink nodes. It also considers communication link costs before making decisions for packet forwarding. Carried out simulation compares the network performance of a wireless sensor network with a single sink, dual sink, and multi sink networking approaches. Based on a series of simulation experiments, the lifetime aware multipath routing approach is found appropriate for increasing the lifetime of sensor nodes significantly when compared to other similar routing schemes. However, energy-efficient packet forwarding is a major concern of this work; other network performance metrics like delay, average packet latency, and packet delivery ratio are also taken into the account.

     

Rendezvous-based data dissemination for supporting mobile sinks in multi-hop clustered wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, a clustering-based technique is considered as an efficient approach for supporting mobile sinks without using position information. It exploits a Backbone-based Virtual Infrastructure (BVI) which uses only cluster heads (CHs) to construct routing structures. Since sensor nodes have constrained energy and are failure-prone, the effective design of both a clustering structure to construct a BVI and a routing protocol in the BVI is an important issue to achieve energy-efficient and reliable data delivery. However, since previous studies use one-hop clustering for a BVI, they are not robust against node and link failures and thus leading low data delivery ratio. They also use flooding-based routing protocols in a BVI and thus leading high energy consumption. Thus, in this paper, we propose a rendezvous-based data dissemination protocol based on multi-hop clustering (RDDM). Since RDDM uses a multi-hop clustering to provide enough backup sensor nodes to substitute a CH and enough backup paths between neighbor CHs, it can provide high robustness against node and link failures. By using a rendezvous CH, RDDM constructs routing paths from source nodes to mobile sinks without flooding in our BVI and thus can save energy of sensor nodes. By considering movement types of sinks, RDDM finds out a shorter path between a source node and a mobile sink through signaling only between neighbor CHs and thus can reduce the energy consumption. Analysis and simulation results show that RDDM provides better performance than previous protocols in terms of energy consumption and data delivery ratio.     

Determining sink location through Zeroing-In attackers in wireless sensor networks

The viability and success of wireless sensor networks critically hinge on the ability of a small number of sinks to glean sensor data throughout the networks. Thus, the locations of sinks are critically important. In this paper, we examine the sink location privacy problem from both the attack and defense perspectives. First, we examine resource-constrained adversaries who can only eavesdrop the network at their vicinities. To determine the sink location, they can launch a Zeroing-In attack by leveraging the fact that several network metrics are 2-dimensional functions in the plane of the network, and their values minimize at the sink. Thus, determining the sink location is equivalent to finding the minima of those functions. We demonstrate that by obtaining the hop counts or the arrival time of a broadcast packet at a few spots in the network, the adversaries are able to determine the sink location with the accuracy of one radio range, which is sufficient to disable the sink by launching jamming attacks, for example. To cope with the Zeroing-In attacks, we present a directed-walk-based routing scheme and show that the defense strategy is effective in deceiving adversaries at little energy costs.     

Novel service protocol for supporting remote and mobile users in wireless sensor networks with multiple static sinks

A wireless sensor network typically consists of users, a sink, and a number of sensor nodes. The users may be remotely connected to a wireless sensor network and via legacy networks such as Internet or Satellite the remote users obtain data collected by the sink that is statically located at a border of the wireless sensor network. However, in practical sensor network applications, there might be two types of users: the traditional remote users and mobile users such as firefighters and soldiers. The mobile users may move around sensor fields and they communicate with the static sink only via the wireless sensor networks in order to obtain data like location information of victims in disaster areas. For supporting the mobile users, existing studies consider temporary structures. However, the temporary structures are constructed per each mobile user or each source nodes so that it causes large energy consumption of sensor nodes. Moreover, since some of them establish the source-based structure, sinks in them cannot gather collective information like mean temperature and object detection. In this paper, to effectively support both the remote users and the mobile users, we propose a novel service protocol relying on the typical wireless sensor network. In the protocol, multiple static sinks connect with legacy networks and divide a sensor field into the number of the multiple sinks. Through sharing queries and data via the legacy networks, the multiple static sinks provide high throughput through distributed data gathering and low latency through short-hops data delivery. Multiple static sinks deliver the aggregated data to the remote users via the legacy networks. In case of the mobile users, when a mobile user moves around, it receives the aggregated data from the nearest static sink. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is more efficient in terms of energy consumption, data delivery ratio, and delay than the existing protocols.     

Multipath energy balancing for clustered wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensors at different locations in the field use different energy levels to propagate sensing data back to the sink or base station. This causes unbalanced energy usage among sensors and also lowers the network lifetime. Currently there are several techniques to mitigate this problem, such as deploying multiple sinks, adding more sensors on heavy traffic areas, or managing the size of clusters depending on the distance from sensor to sink. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm and protocol called Multipath Energy Balancing (MEB) to mitigate unbalanced energy usage in clustered wireless sensor networks using multi-path and multi-hop, with a transmission power control approach. The network field is divided into regions, where the ratio of inter-region transmission traffic from all cluster head sensors in one region to other cluster head sensors in the two regions in front can be pre-computed and pre-programmed into the sensors to ease sensor deployment. To further prolong network lifetime, we also present a simple heuristic algorithm to procrastinate cluster formation and routing. Simulation results show that MEB can balance energy much better than Energy-efficient Clustering (EC) and Balancing Energy Consumption (BEC) solutions. It also has a longer network lifetime than EC and BEC protocols, especially when the required cluster size is small. Procrastinating cluster formation and routing also can further improve the network lifetime.

     

A mobile sink path planning for wireless sensor networks based on priority‐ordered dependent nonparametric trees

The professional design of the routing protocols with mobile sink(s) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is important for many purposes such as maximizing energy efficiency, increasing network life, and evenly distributing load balance across the network. Moreover, mobile sinks ought to first collect data from nodes which have very important and dense data so that packet collision and loss can be prevented at an advanced level. For these purposes, the present paper proposes a new mobile path planning protocol by introducing priority‐ordered dependent nonparametric trees (PoDNTs) for WSNs. Unlike traditional clustered or swarm intelligence topology‐based routing methods, a topology which has hierarchical and dependent infinite tree structure provides a robust link connection between nodes, making it easier to reselect ancestor nodes (ANs). The proposed priority‐ordered infinite trees are sampled in the specific time frames by introducing new equations and hierarchically associated with their child nodes starting from the root node. Hence, the nodes with the highest priority and energy that belong to the constructed tree family are selected as ANs with an opportunistic approach. A mobile sink simply visits these ANs to acquire data from all nodes in the network and return to where it started. As a result, the route traveled is assigned as the mobile path for the current round. We have performed comprehensive performance analysis to illustrate the effectiveness of the present study using NS‐2 simulation environment. The present routing protocol has achieved better results than the other algorithms over various performance metrics.     

Data security in unattended wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Unattended wireless sensor networks operating in hostile environments face the risk of compromise. Given the unattended nature, sensors must safeguard their sensed data of high value temporarily. However, saving data inside a network creates security problems due to the lack of tamper‐resistance of sensors and the unattended nature of the network. In some occasions, a network controller may periodically dispatch mobile sinks to collect data. If a mobile sink is given too many privileges, it will become very attractive for attack. Thus, the privilege of mobile sinks should be restricted. Additionally, secret keys should be used to achieve data confidentiality, integrity, and authentication between communicating parties. To address these security issues, we present mAKPS, an asymmetric key predistribution scheme with mobile sinks, to facilitate the key distribution and privilege restriction of mobile sinks, and schemes for sensors to protect their collected data in unattended wireless sensor networks. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy-Aware Data Aggregation for Grid-Based Wireless Sensor Networks with a Mobile Sink

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are made up of many small and highly sensitive nodes that have the ability to react quickly. In WSNs, sink mobility brings new challenges to large-scale sensor networks. Almost all of the energy-aware routing protocols that have been proposed for WSNs aim at optimizing network performance while relaying data to a stationary gateway (sink). However, through such contemporary protocols, mobility of the sink can make established routes unstable and non-optimal. The use of mobile sinks introduces a trade-off between the need for frequent rerouting to ensure optimal network operation and the desire to minimize the overhead of topology management. In this paper, in order to reduce energy consumption and minimize the overhead of rerouting frequency, we propose an energy-aware data aggregation scheme (EADA) for grid-based wireless sensor networks with a mobile sink. In the proposed scheme, each sensor node with location information and limited energy is considered. Our approach utilizes location information and selects a special gateway in each area of a grid responsible for forwarding messages. We restrict the flooding region to decrease the overhead for route decision by utilizing local information. We conducted simulations to show that the proposed routing scheme outperforms the coordination-based data dissemination scheme (CODE) (Xuan, H. L., & Lee, S. Proceedings of the Sensor Networks and Information Processing Conference, pp. 13–18, 2004).     

Reinforcement learning movement path for multiple mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks

Mobile sink nodes play a very active role in wireless sensor network (WSN) routing. Because hiring these nodes can decrease the energy consumption of each node, end-to-end delay, and network latency significantly. Therefore, mobile sinks can soar the network lifetime dramatically. Generally, there are three movement paths for a mobile sink, which are as follows: (1) Random/stochastic, (2) controlled, and (3) fixed/ predictable/predefined paths. In this paper, a novel movement path is introduced as a fourth category of movement paths for mobile sinks. This path is based on deep learning, so a mobile sink node can go to the appropriate region that has more data at a suitable time. Thereupon, WSN routing can improve very much in terms of end-to-end delay, network latency, network lifetime, delivery ratio, and energy efficiency. The new proposed routing suggests a reinforcement learning movement path (RLMP) for multiple mobile sinks. The network in the proposed work consists of a couple of regions; each region can be employed for a special purpose, so this method is hired for any application and any size of the network. All simulations in this paper are done by network simulator 3 (NS-3). The experimental results clearly show that the RLMP overcomes other approaches by at least 32.48% in the network lifetime benchmark.     

Dynamic traffic-aware routing algorithm for multi-sink wireless sensor networks

In this paper, a distributed traffic-balancing routing algorithm is proposed for multi-sink wireless sensor networks that effectively distributes traffic from sources to sinks. Each node has a gradient field that is used to decide on a neighbor node to reach a sink. The node’s gradient index contains (1) the distance cost from a source to a respective sink, and (2) traffic information from neighboring nodes. The proposed algorithm considers the traffic being faced by surrounding neighbors before forwarding packets to any sink using gradient search for routing and providing a balance between optimal paths and possible congestion on routes toward those sinks. The key objective of this work is to achieve traffic-balancing by detecting congested areas along the route and distributing packets along paths that have idle and underloaded nodes. Extensive simulations conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme indicate that it effectively reduces the overall packet delay, energy consumption and improves the packet delivery ratio under heavy traffic.     

DDRP: An efficient data‐driven routing protocol for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Introduction of mobile sinks into a wireless sensor network can largely improve the network performance. However, sink mobility can cause unexpected changes of network topology, which may bring excessive protocol overhead for route maintenance and may offset the benefit from using mobile sinks. In this paper, we propose an efficient data‐driven routing protocol (DDRP) to address this problem. The design objective is to effectively reduce the protocol overhead for data gathering in wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks. DDRP exploits the broadcast feature of wireless medium for route learning. Specifically, each data packet carries an additional option recording the known distance from the sender of the packet to target mobile sink. The overhearing of transmission of such a data packet will gratuitously provide each listener a route to a mobile sink. Continuous such route‐learning among nodes will provide fresh route information to more and more nodes in the network. When no route to mobile sink is known, random walk routing simply is adopted for data packet forwarding. Simulation results show that DDRP can achieve much lower protocol overhead and longer network lifetime as compared with existing work while preserving high packet delivery ratio. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A quadtree-based hierarchical data dissemination for mobile sensor networks

The envisioned sensor network architecture where some of the nodes may be mobile poses several new challenges to this special type of ad hoc wireless network. Recently, researchers have proposed several data dissemination protocols based on either some hierarchical structure mainly constructed by a source node or source/sink oriented dissemination tree to support mobile sinks. However, such a source-initiated hierarchical structure results in significant resource consumption as the number of source-sink pairs are increased. Additionally, stimulus mobility aggravates the situation, where several sources may build a separate data forwarding hierarchy along the stimulus moving path. In this paper, we propose a new data dissemination protocol that exploits “Quadtree-based network space partitioning” to provide more efficient routing among multiple mobile stimuli and sink nodes. A common hierarchy of cluster-head nodes is constructed where the data delivery to mobile sinks is independent of the current position of mobile stimuli. Therefore, the overhead needed for hierarchy (route) maintenance is lower. Simulation results show that our work significantly reduces average energy consumption while maintaining comparably higher data delivery ratio.     

Extending the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks Through Mobile Relays

We investigate the benefits of a heterogeneous architecture for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) composed of a few resource rich mobile relay nodes and a large number of simple static nodes. The mobile relays have more energy than the static sensors. They can dynamically move around the network and help relieve sensors that are heavily burdened by high network traffic, thus extending the latter's lifetime. We first study the performance of a large dense network with one mobile relay and show that network lifetime improves over that of a purely static network by up to a factor of four. Also, the mobile relay needs to stay only within a two-hop radius of the sink. We then construct a joint mobility and routing algorithm which can yield a network lifetime close to the upper bound. The advantage of this algorithm is that it only requires a limited number of nodes in the network to be aware of the location of the mobile relay. Our simulation results show that one mobile relay can at least double the network lifetime in a randomly deployed WSN. By comparing the mobile relay approach with various static energy-provisioning methods, we demonstrate the importance of node mobility for resource provisioning in a WSN.      

Analysis of tree‐based multicast routing in wireless sensor networks with varying network metrics

Wireless ad hoc and sensor networks are emerging with advances in electronic device technology, wireless communications and mobile computing with flexible and adaptable features. Routing protocols act as an interface between the lower and higher layers of the network protocol stack. Depending on the size of target nodes, routing techniques are classified into unicast, multicast and broadcast protocols. In this article, we give analysis and performance evaluation of tree‐based multicast routing in wireless sensor networks with varying network metrics. Geographic multicast routing (GMR) and its variations are used extensively in sensor networks. Multicast routing protocols considered in the analytical model are GMR, distributed GMR, demand scalable GMR, hierarchical GMR, destination clustering GMR and sink‐initiated GMR. Simulations are given with comparative analysis based on varying network metrics such as multicast group size, number of sink nodes, average multicast latency, number of clusters, packet delivery ratio, energy cost ratio and link failure rate. Analytical results indicate that wireless sensor network multicast routing protocols operate on the node structure (such as hierarchical, clustered, distributed, dense and sparse networks) and application specific parameters. Simulations indicate that hierarchical GMR is used for generic multicast applications and that destination clustering GMR and demand scalable GMR are used for distributed multicast applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Increasing network lifetime by balancing node energy consumption in heterogeneous sensor networks

Sensor nodes are powered by battery and have severe energy constraints. The typical many‐to‐one traffic pattern causes uneven energy consumption among sensor nodes, that is, sensor nodes near the base station or a cluster head have much heavier traffic burden and run out of power much faster than other nodes. The uneven node energy dissipation dramatically reduces sensor network lifetime. In a previous work, we presented the chessboard clustering scheme to increase network lifetime by balancing node energy consumption. To achieve good performance and scalability, we propose to form a heterogeneous sensor network by deploying a few powerful high‐end sensors in addition to a large number of low‐end sensors. In this paper, we design an efficient routing protocol based on the chessboard clustering scheme, and we compute the minimum node density for satisfying a given lifetime constraint. Simulation experiments show that the chessboard clustering‐based routing protocol balances node energy consumption very well and dramatically increases network lifetime, and it performs much better than two other clustering‐based schemes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Probabilistic routing protocol for a hybrid wireless underground sensor networks

A wireless underground sensor network (WUSN) is defined as a network of wireless sensor devices in which all sensor devices are deployed completely underground (network sinks or any devices specifically for relay between sensors and a sink may be aboveground). In hybrid wireless underground sensor network (HWUSN), communication between nodes is implemented from underground‐to‐air or air‐to‐underground, not underground‐to‐underground. This paper proposes a novel hybrid underground probabilistic routing protocol that provides an efficient means of communication for sensor nodes in HWUSN. In addition, signal propagation based on the shadowing model for underground medium is developed. The proposed routing protocol ensures high packet throughput, prolongs the lifetime of HWUSN and the random selection of the next hop with multi‐path forwarding contributes to built‐in security. Moreover, the proposed mechanism utilizes an optimal forwarding (OF) decision that takes into account of the link quality, and the remaining power of next hop sensor nodes. The performance of proposed routing protocol has been successfully studied and verified through the simulation and real test bed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Non-interference topology scheme in wireless sensor networks

A novel topology scheme, cell with multiple mobile sinks method (CMMSM), is proposed in this article for the collection of information and for the environment monitoring in wireless sensor networks. The system consists of many static sensors, scattered in a large scale sensing field and multiple mobile sinks, cruising among the clusters. Conservation of energy and simplification of protocol are important design considerations in this scheme. The noninterference topology scheme largely simplifies the full-distributed communication protocol with the ability of collision avoidance and random routing. The total number of cluster heads in such a topology was analyzed, and then an approximate evaluation of the total energy consumption in one round was carried out. Simulation results show that CMMSM can save considerable energy and obtain higher throughput than low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and geographical adaptive fidelity (GAF).     

An energy efficient Genetic Algorithm based approach for sensor-to-sink binding in multi-sink wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ad-hoc networks in which sensors, that are designed to relay data back to sink nodes and/or Base Stations, are deployed in an area and may be configured in real time. Sensors, however, have limited energy supplies and are often left untouched after deployment, thus making battery replacement very difficult or even impossible. Therefore, energy should be efficiently conserved to extend the WSNs lifetime. One of the existing solutions is to deploy multiple sinks, more capable nodes in comparison to sensors, in the network to increase the coverage area and shorten the communication distance between sensors and sinks. However, this raises the issue concerning which sensors should bind to which sinks in order to avoid overloading particular sinks. In this paper, we devise a Genetic Algorithm based approach to solve the problem of balancing the load of sensors amongst sinks in a multi-sink WSN, while ensuring that the best routes to sinks are found for the sensors that cannot directly reach a sink. We evaluate the performance of our approach and compare it to an existing one using the network simulator NS-2 through measuring several metrics such as the variance of remaining energy among sinks, and energy consumption in sinks. The obtained results show that the proposed approach promising.     

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.