An energy-balanced swept-coverage mechanism for mobile WSNs

Coverage is one of the most important issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In literature, many coverage mechanisms have been proposed and employed mobile sensors to cover (heal) the coverage holes in the monitoring region. Consider that there are no redundant mobile sensors in a monitoring region. Some studies presented hole-movement mechanisms which used a mobile sensor to move a hole from one location to another, achieving the swept coverage of the monitoring region. However, in these studies, there are only some mobile sensors that participate in the hole-movement task, leading to an energy-unbalanced WSN. This paper considers a mobile WSN that contains holes and has no redundant mobile sensors to reach the spatial full coverage of the given monitoring region. To meet the swept coverage of the given monitoring region and balance the energies of mobile sensors, a distributed energy-balanced hole-movement mechanism, called EBHMM, is proposed. Theoretical analysis and performance evaluation reveal that the proposed EBHMM has better performance than existing hole-movement mechanisms in terms of the network lifetime and energy-balanced degree of mobile sensors.     

Hierarchical management protocol for constructing a QoS communication path in wireless Ad Hoc networks

An Ad Hoc network consists of mobile hosts that can dynamically construct a wireless network without base stations. Due to the limited communication range, a source host usually needs other hosts to relay messages to the destination in a multi-hop manner. Consequently, establishing a routing path from the source to the destination is a basic requirement for providing communication service between any pair of mobile hosts. This study proposes a two-level management approach for efficiently constructing and maintaining a QoS routing path in Ad Hoc wireless networks, significantly reducing the quantity of control packets. In the first phase, the mobile hosts are partitioned into a number of complete graphs, each represented by a Supernode managed by an agent. The Ad Hoc network topology is thus transformed to an Agent-based Graph (AG). In the second phase, some agents of a larger degree than neighboring agents are selected as core nodes. The core nodes then virtually construct a Core Graph (CG). The proposed two-level hierarchical management and bandwidth-looking-ahead technologies can efficiently establish and maintain a QoS communication path at a low control packet cost. Simulation results indicate that the proposed management model significantly reduces the number of control packets in areas with very large numbers of mobile hosts.     

Hash caching mechanism in source-based routing for wireless ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc network (MANET), on-demand routing protocols are proposed for establishing a route in a distributed manner only when a source host originates a data packet addressed to the destination host. In source-based routing (SBR) protocols, route discovery usually raises a large number of request packets for exploring the current state of the network, but it also performs the collection of useful information for future routing decisions. How to store and manage this collected information in the limited size of cache in order to improve routing performance is still an open issue in the development of an SBR scheme. This paper proposes a novel hash caching mechanism and distributed hashing routing methods to store, utilize, and manage the cached routes in order to improve cache capacity, routing performance, and network throughput. The experimental results indicate that the proposed mechanism offers high cache capacity, efficient route discovery, and good throughput for the MANET.     

Accident aware localization mechanism for wireless sensor networks

Accurate location information is important for event reporting, coverage estimation, and location-aware routing in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Recently, a number of range-free localization schemes have been proposed to provide each static sensor with location information, which is represented by a rectangular region. However, most WSN applications are applied in outdoor environments where the sensors’ location regions could be incorrect due to sudden accidents. This paper proposes an Active Location Correction Protocol, called ALCP, for detecting and correcting the occurrence of location error based on the bounding box technology. Performance study reveals that applying the ALCP to improve the location accuracies can enhance the performance of the well-known GPSR routing in terms of routing length, sensing coverage, and packet arrival rate.     

Obstacle-Free Geocasting Protocols for Single/Multi-Destination Short Message Services in Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) comprise mobile hosts in a network bereft of base stations and characterized by a highly dynamic network topology. The MANET environment contains unpredictable obstacles, such as mountains, lakes, buildings, or regions without any hosts, impeding or blocking message relay. This study proposes geocasting protocols for sending short message from a source host to single or multiple geocasting regions in ad hoc networks. The proposed protocols keep messages away from unpredictable obstacles and create a small flooding region. Experimental results show that a source host can send a short message to all hosts located in single or multiple geographical areas with a high success rate and low flooding overhead.     

Throughput enhancement by exploiting spatial reuse opportunities with smart antenna systems in wireless ad hoc networks

Smart antenna (or multi-beam antenna) systems can support simultaneous transmissions (or receptions) of multiple packets in different beams using the same channel. However, network performance is highly dependent on transmission scheduling. This study develops two transmission-scheduling schemes for use with smart antenna systems to improve network throughput and reduce transmission delay. The proposed scheduling mechanisms, which are designed to minimize the average latency and maximize network throughput, exploit the opportunities for parallel transmissions and consider communication restrictions and packet sizes. The performance results indicate that the proposed schemes outperform previous schemes in network throughput and transmission delay.