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.     

A distributed data storage protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

This paper presents ProFlex, a distributed data storage protocol for large-scale Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks (HWSNs) with mobile sinks. ProFlex guarantees robustness in data collection by intelligently managing data replication among selected storage nodes in the network. Contrarily to related protocols in the literature, ProFlex considers the resource constraints of sensor nodes and constructs multiple data replication structures, which are managed by more powerful nodes. Additionally, ProFlex takes advantage of the higher communication range of such powerful nodes and uses the long-range links to improve data distribution by storage nodes. When compared with related protocols, we show through simulation that Proflex has an acceptable performance under message loss scenarios, decreases the overhead of transmitted messages, and decreases the occurrence of the energy hole problem. Moreover, we propose an improvement that allows the protocol to leverage the inherent data correlation and redundancy of wireless sensor networks in order to decrease even further the protocol’s overhead without affecting the quality of the data distribution by storage nodes.     

An efficient distributed routing protocol for wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks

Introducing mobile sinks into a wireless sensor network can effectively improve the network performance. However, sink mobility can bring excessive protocol overhead for route maintenance and may offset the benefit from using mobile sinks. In this paper, we propose a dynamic layered routing protocol to address this problem. The proposed protocol integrates dynamic layered Voronoi scoping and dynamic anchor selection to effectively reduce the dissemination scopes and frequencies of routing updates as the sinks move in the network. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol can effectively reduce the protocol overhead while ensuring high packet delivery ratio as compared with existing work. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hybrid data dissemination protocol (HDDP) for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Networks - Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often used for monitoring environmental conditions. One of the most important tasks in a WSN is to gather sensed data for the users to...     

A Bloom filters based dissemination protocol in wireless sensor networks

There is a growing need for enabling reprogramming a working sensor network in unattended area. We prefer to meet the requirements remotely by disseminating parameters instead of collecting all deployed sensors. Identifying the version differences of parameters on different sensor nodes can significantly reduce the communication overhead, because only those out-of-date ones need to be updated. In this paper, we propose BDP, a Bloom filter based data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks. Using Bloom filters as compact storage of the version information of data items, BDP efficiently identifies the version differences among data items with the same key and guarantees network-wide consistency with high reliability. Testbed experiment and simulation results demonstrate that BDP outperforms the existing schemes with low energy cost, short propagation delay of updating new items, and high reliability.     

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.     

Decoupling data dissemination from mobile sink's trajectory in wireless sensor networks

We propose an efficient proactive data dissemination approach that allows a mobile sink to effectively gather a representative view of a monitored region covered by n sensor nodes by visiting any m nodes, where m << n. Moreover, the proposed strategy allows the mobile sink to follow any trajectory through the deployment region, thus decoupling the data dissemination management from the mobile sink?s trajectory. Index Terms?Random walks; proactive data     

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 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.     

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.     

An efficient data dissemination model for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Networks - In a wireless sensor network, one of the most important constraints on sensor nodes is their power source, which is a battery. Sensor nodes carry a limited and generally...     

Energy-efficient neighbor discovery protocol for mobile wireless sensor networks

Low energy consumption is a critical design requirement for most wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Due to minimal transmission power levels, time-varying environmental factors and mobility of nodes, network neighborhood changes frequently. In these conditions, the most critical issue for energy is to minimize the transactions and time consumed for neighbor discovery operations. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient neighbor discovery protocol targeted at synchronized low duty-cycle medium access control (MAC) schemes such as IEEE 802.15.4 and S-MAC. The protocol effectively reduces the need for costly network scans by proactively distributing node schedule information in MAC protocol beacons and by using this information for establishing new communication links. Energy consumption is further reduced by optimizing the beacon transmission rate. The protocol is validated by performance analysis and experimental measurements with physical WSN prototypes. Experimental results show that the protocol can reduce node energy consumption up to 80% at 1–3 m/s node mobility.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Anycast tree-based routing in mobile wireless sensor networks with multiple sinks

A routing scheme for wireless sensor networks with mobile sensors and mobile multiple sinks is proposed and studied. The scheme is based on expanding ring search, anycast messaging and reactive mode with maintaining route state information in sensors. As a result of a successful routing request issued by the sensor, it becomes a member of a routing tree with some sink as a root. Anycast messaging is used only at the stage of establishing a path from a sensor to a sink. Replies from sinks are always forwarded in unicast mode. This considerably reduces network traffic and, as a result, energy consumption by sensors. To take into account routing conditions for network nodes in receiving messages from different directions, the receiving area of each node is assumed to consist of a number of sectors, considered as independent links with random change of link states in time. The proposed routing scheme was investigated with the use of a detailed simulation model, implemented in terms of a class of extended Petri nets. In simulation the following performance metrics were investigated versus time-to-live value: response ratio, relative network traffic and relative energy consumption. These metrics were considered for a number of combinations of parameters, such as the number of sinks, sensor availability and link availability. The results of simulation were compared with published characteristics of a similar model, in which sensors do not maintain any routing state information, and is proved to outperform it.     

Dynamic proxy tree-based data dissemination schemes for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, efficiently disseminating data from a dynamic source to multiple mobile sinks is important for the applications such as mobile target detection and tracking. The tree-based multicasting scheme can be used. However, because of the short communication range of each sensor node and the frequent movement of sources and sinks, a sink may fail to receive data due to broken paths, and the tree should be frequently reconfigured to reconnect sources and sinks. To address the problem, we propose a dynamic proxy tree-based framework in this paper. A big challenge in implementing the framework is how to efficiently reconfigure the proxy tree as sources and sinks change. We model the problem as on-line constructing a minimum Steiner tree in an Euclidean plane, and propose centralized schemes to solve it. Considering the strict energy constraints in wireless sensor networks, we further propose two distributed on-line schemes, the shortest path-based (SP) scheme and the spanning range-based (SR) scheme. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the schemes. The results show that the distributed schemes have similar performance as the centralized ones, and among the distributed schemes, the SR scheme outperforms the SP scheme.     

SGDD: self‐managed grid‐based data dissemination protocol for mobile sink in wireless sensor network

The reduction of energy consumption in order to increase network lifetime is one of the most major challenges in the design of wireless sensor networks. During data dissemination, the sensors that are located in the sink's neighborhood are responsible to relay data to the other nodes; hence, their energy is exhausted expeditiously. Therefore, the idea of utilizing mobile sinks can be so advantageous to decrease energy consumption during data dissemination process. In this paper, we propose self‐managed grid‐based data disseminating protocol for mobile sink in wireless sensor networks by using the idea of constructing a virtual grid. In self‐managed grid‐based data disseminating protocol, sink and nodes map their geographical position to a virtual location. In order to increase the performance, we have employed a cell head for each grid cell. Cell heads are selected based on two parameters, centralization and residual energy. Our data dissemination protocol is simple and has low overhead to construct and maintain. Also, we have presented a new method for sink location update, which leads to the least cost in data transfer. Simulation results illustrate that by utilizing hierarchical functionality and determining an optimal size for grid cells, energy consumption is decreased, which leads to increasing network lifetime. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A schedule‐based medium access control protocol for mobile wireless sensor networks

Recent advances in body area network technologies such as radio frequency identification and ham radio, to name a few, have introduced a huge gap between the use of current wireless sensor network technologies and specific needs of some important wireless sensor network applications such as medical care, disaster relief, or emergency preparedness and response. In these types of applications, the mobility of nodes can occur, leading to the challenge of mobility handling. In this paper, we address this challenge by prioritizing transmissions of mobile nodes over static nodes. This is achieved by using shorter contention windows in reservation slots for mobile nodes (the so‐called backoff technique) combined with a novel hybrid medium access control (MAC) protocol (the so‐called versatile MAC). The proposed protocol advocates channel reuse for bandwidth efficiency and management purpose. Through extensive simulations, our protocol is compared with other MAC alternatives such as time division multiple access and IEEE 802.11 with request to send/clear to send exchange, chosen as benchmarks. The performance metrics used are bandwidth utilization, fairness of medium access, and energy consumption. The superiority of versatile MAC against the studied benchmark protocols is established with respect to these metrics. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.