Constructing rings overlay for robust data collection in wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates the construction of rings overlay in wireless sensor networks and presents an enhanced relay scheme for improving the robustness of data collection through the rings overlay. Rings overlay is a class of multi-path routing structure that exploits the broadcast nature of wireless communication to cope with communication failures. In constructing the rings overlay, we propose a distributed approach to allow sensor nodes to benefit from multi-path routing as much as possible. Our proposed approach only requires sensor nodes to have local neighborhood information. In our enhanced relay scheme, sensor nodes in the ring next to the base station benefit from multi-path routing without having to transmit their data multiple times. Experimental results show that compared with a baseline greedy construction approach and the original relay scheme, the proposed techniques of overlay construction and relay enhancement significantly improve the robustness and accuracy of sensor data collection through the rings overlay.