Sensor Web: An energy-efficient and self-organizing Wireless Sensor Network Model

Proposer: Dr. Hanh Le

Abbreviation: S-Web

Brief Description:

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged in the last few years providing a rich set of environmental information with a wide variety of useful applications such as environment monitoring. Sensors are small devices with limited storage, processing capability, and battery power. The main constraint in WSNs is that wireless sensor nodes have very limited battery power thereby limiting their transmission range or lifetime. A powerful base station with a continuous power supply can transmit data much further. Therefore multi-hop routing in WSNs helps in reducing power consumption in the sensor nodes and prolonging the WSN lifespan. However many-hop routes lead to long delays from the source to the destination which makes the WSN unsuitable for delay-sensitive applications.

One of the major weakness of existing centralized algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) routing is that sensor nodes need to report their status (e.g. remaining energy level) to the central node (i.e. the Base Station –BS) while receiving continuous configuration information from the BS (e.g. next hop routing). As a result, the WSNs suffer from high communication and/or computation overheads at sensor nodes to accommodate topology changes in the WSN.

“Sensor Web” is a promising WSN model that can address challenging problems for WSNs at both routing layer [1] and MAC layer [2] . As a result, WSNs can prolong not only the lifespan of the WSN overall but also save energy consumption for each node. Meanwhile S-Web can deliver messages with low delay compared to Minimum Spanning Tree techniques.

The project aims at building a prototype of “Sensor Web” using SunSPOT sensors.

Computer Science Content: Wireless Communication, WSN, Java Programming

Specific Learning Outcomes: Practical experience with sensors (e.g., programming sensors, automation of WSNs). The prototype could lead to a commercialisable product.

Skills Required by Team as a Whole:

• Theory: WSN

• Implementation: Moderate to High. The project is about developing a prototype to test the localization, routing and MAC algorithms of Sensor Web scheme.

Facilities needed: Sensors and Base stations (all provided)

Supervision: Dr. Hanh Le and Dr. Yoann Paichard from Electrical Engineering Faculty, weekly meetings and planning sessions to keep students on track

Number of Students: 3 or 2

References:

[1] H. Le, D. Hoang, and R. Poliah, "S-Web: an efficient and self-organizing Wireless Sensor Network Model," presented at In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Network-Based Information Systems, LNCS-5186, Turin, Italy, 2008.

[2] H. Le and M. Takizawa, "A hybrid technique for efficient Medium Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks," presented at Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA2010), Perth, Australia, 2010.