Study of context-awareness efficiency applied to duty cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Context-awareness has gained an increasing popularity in ubiquitous computing environments as it allows automatic adaptation of protocols behavior according to context changes. Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), deployed as a main appliance to gather contextual information, can benefit from their own context data. In such scarce resource networks, the concept of context-awareness can be exploited either to optimize resource usage or to enhance the functional behavior of operating protocols. In this paper, we investigate the benefits brought by the concept of context-awareness when exploited in duty-cycled networks, since WSNs rely mainly on power saving mode in order to prolong the lifetime of sensor nodes. We focus mainly on the broadcast operation required for data collection and routing task. To quantify these improvements, we propose a comparative study relying on our ECAB protocol, using context-awareness jointly with a duty cycle mechanism to assure an efficient multi-hop broadcasting. To this end, we compare ECAB against protocols operating without context-awareness. Results show the effectiveness of this concept to improve network performances related to energy consumption, latency and packet delivery.