Energy-efficient self-organization protocols for sensor networks.

摘要

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN, for short) consists of a large number of very small sensor devices deployed in an area of interest for gathering and delivery information. The fundamental goal of a WSN is to produce, over an extended period of time, global information from local data obtained by individual sensors. The WSN technology will have a significant impact on a wide array of applications on the efficiency of many civilian and military applications including combat field surveillance, intrusion detection, disaster management among many others. The basic management problem in the WSN is to balance the utility of the activity in the network against the cost incurred by the network resources to perform this activity. Since the sensors are battery powered and it is impossible to change or recharge batteries after the sensors are deployed, promoting system longevity becomes one of the most important design goals instead of QoS provisioning and bandwidth efficiency. On the other hand the self-organization ability is essential for the WSN due to the fact that the sensors are randomly deployed and they work unattended. We developed a self-organization protocol, which creates a multi-hop communication infrastructure capable of utilizing the limited resources of sensors in an adaptive and efficient way. The resulting general-purpose infrastructure is robust, easy to maintain and adapts well to various application needs. Important by-products of our infrastructure include: (1) Energy efficiency: in order to save energy and to extend the longevity of the WSN sensors, which are in sleep mode most of the time. (2) Adaptivity: the infrastructure is adaptive to network size, network topology, network density and application requirement. (3) Robustness: the degree to which the infrastructure is robust and resilient. Analytical results and simulation confirmed that our self-organization protocol has a number of desirable properties and compared favorably with the leading protocols in the literature.