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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

RECOD: reliable detection protocol for large-scale and dynamic continuous objects in wireless sensor networks

Whether individual objects such as enemy tanks or intruders have been reliably detected typically depends on the number of data reports successfully delivered to a sink node from the sensor nodes surrounding the object. When the number of data reports exceeds a required threshold, the sink recognizes the object that is detected by sensor nodes. Thus, previous studies exploited this framework for reliable detection as event reliability for individual objects, and proposed event-to-sink reliable-transport mechanisms that can reach a required threshold. Recently, in wireless sensor networks, research has focused on coverage detection for large-scale phenomena such as biochemical material and wild fires. Such phenomena are known as continuous objects because they generally cover wide areas and frequently change their shape as a result of wind or geographical features. Since continuous objects are large-scale and alterable, they present new challenges for the event reliability. In this paper, we first define new criteria for measuring the event reliability of large-scale phenomena. Then, we propose a novel event-to-sink transport protocol that is reliable, even when excessive data is generated from many sensor nodes detecting these phenomena. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate the event reliability of our protocol.

     

Scalable location guide overlay multicast in mobile ad hoc networks using tree partition scheme

Nodes mobility brings flinty challenges to multicast in Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs). To track nodes mobility, flooding messages are widely used for data delivery structure construction and maintenance in many multicast protocols. These periodic flooding messages significantly consume network resources, such as energy and bandwidth, and result in network collisions. To release data delivery structure maintenance onus, profited from GPS location service, a number of stateless location based multicast protocol were proposed, where a destination list is encapsulated into each data packet for data packet orientation. However, due to data packet capability limitation, the way of encapsulating a destination list in each data packet header restricts the protocol scalability. To solve the scalability issue of multicast protocols, we propose a Scalable Location Guide Overlay Multicast (SLGOM) for MANETs. Analysis and simulation results show that SLGOM achieves high performance in large multicast group and significantly improves the scalability of stateless multicast with respect to group size. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.