Operation Research Based Techniques in Wireless Sensors Networks

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen an increasing interest in developing and designing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSNs consist of large number of nodes, with wireless communications and computation abilities that can be used in variety of domains. It has been used in areas that have direct contact with monitoring and gathering data, to name few, health monitoring, military surveillance, geological monitoring (Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Tsunami), agriculture control and many more. However, the design and implementation of WSNs face many challenges, due to the power limitation of sensor nodes, deployment and localization, data routing and data aggregation, data security, limited bandwidth, storage capacity and network management. It is known that Operation Research (OR) has been widely used in different areas to solve optimization problems; such as improving network performance and maximizing lifetime of system. In this survey, we present the most recent OR based techniques applied to solve different WSNs problems: the node scheduling problem, energy management problems, nodes allocating issues and other WSNs related complex problems. Different Operational Research techniques are presented and discussed in details here, including graph theory based techniques, linear programing and mixed integer programming related approaches.

Optimization in Wireless Networks

“…These questions give rise to new complex problems and challenges in Operations Research. Indeed, Operation Research is widely used to solve WSNs optimization problems; such as improving network performance and maximizing the lifetime of the system [43,26].…”

A dynamic heuristic for WSNs routing

“…The routing algorithm is used to determine mathematically the best path to take. In (Dilo et al, 2011) (Mahlous & Tounsi, 2017) the authors showed that the use of shortest path tree in routing is the most common technique used for routing within WSNs. Hence, they exhibited the issues with shortest path tree, which is the unbalanced load between the sensors and the disparity in the energy used by such nodes.…”

“…All sensors can route data or collect it from their environment. There are several real-life applications for WSNs, such as fire detection, military surveillance, monitoring, and physiological monitoring of patient, wild fires surveillance, grid monitoring, water distribution monitoring and much more (Jing, 2017;Mahlous & Tounsi, 2017;Le Nguyen et al, 2019;Sharma & Ghose, 2010;Thakkar & Kotecha, 2014). Due to their limited capacity, one of the main challenges to WSNs is how to increase the network lifetime by performing data routing that consume less energy.…”