Proactive reconfiguration of wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Network dynamics, such as mobility and increase in network load, can influence the performance of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In this paper, we introduce a method which exploits design-time knowledge of the application scenario dynamics to construct a proactive run-time reconfiguration approach. The approach anticipates for the impact that predefined dynamic events can have on the performance of the WSN by switching between various modes of operation defined at design-time. A mode defines the values for the controllable parameters of the network protocol stack. Our approach explicitly differentiates between parameters that can be adapted locally, per node, and those that should be considered globally for the whole WSN. Design-time definition of modes results in a very low run-time overhead as we only require detection of the mode to use and a low overhead synchronization to change global parameters. The approach is made robust by using a recovery approach for nodes unaware of their global mode after, for example, (re-)joining the network. Experiments with an office monitoring deployment and extensive simulations of a cow-health monitoring scenario show that our approach can easily be adopted by practical WSN deployments and results in a significant reduction in resource usage, e.g., power consumption in our examples, at a very low run-time overhead cost.

Use of Contextual Information to Optimize Wireless Sensor Node’s Energy Consumption Rate during Reprogramming Procedures

“…Steine et al, in [2] introduced an approach that exploits design-time knowledge of the application scenario dynamics to construct and implements a proactive runtime reconfiguration paradigm. However, two challenging issues are apparent here: the possibility of capturing all anticipated reconfiguration needs can be challenging, and the scarcely available memory space might not be sufficient to accommodate codes written to address these needs.…”

“…In view of these needs and observed deficiencies in existing approaches [2,4] this research work is intended to address the following:…”

“…Adopting the Castalia framework, a network of six wireless sensor nodes was setup on the OMNeT++ platform. One of the nodes SNode[0] serves as the agent that links all the other sensor nodes to the base station, three of the nodes SNode [2] , SNode [3] and SNode [5] were programmed with context based reconfiguration capabilities and the remaining other two nodes SNode [1] and SNode [4] take on default reconfiguration paradigm. Figures 11 depicts the nodes arrangement within the network.…”

A Distributed Reconfiguration Approach for Quality-of-Service Provisioning in Dynamic Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

“…If it is important to quickly respond to infrequent relatively fast dynamics, with a large impact on network QoS, a reactive approach such as ours is inherently less efficient. For that case, one might resort to a proactive reconfiguration strategy, such as discussed in [Steine et al 2011b]. With such an approach, observable network dynamics trigger reconfiguration before and independent of their actual impact on the network QoS.…”

An energy benchmark for software updates on wireless sensor nodes

“…But the energy consumed also depends on the system software that runs on a node: the operating system, device drivers, and networking stack. For example, disabling the receiver [20] during overheard/unwanted radio messages, or using different modes of operation [22] allows the hardware to be used more efficiently.…”