Wireless Sensor Networks – Report

What is a WSN?

Wireless sensor network (WSN) refers to a group of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors for
monitoring and recording the physical conditions of the environment and organizing the collected
data at a central location. The WSN is built of "nodes" – from a few to several hundreds or even
thousands, where each node is connected to one (or sometimes several) sensors. Each such sensor
network node has typically several parts: a radio transceiver with an internal antenna or
connection to an external antenna, a microcontroller, an electronic circuit for interfacing with the
sensors and an energy source, usually a battery or an embedded form of energy harvesting. Size
and cost constraints on sensor nodes result in corresponding constraints on resources such as
energy, memory, computational speed and communications bandwidth. The topology of the WSNs
can vary from a simple star network to an advanced multi-hop wireless mesh network. The
propagation technique between the hops of the network can be Routing or Flooding.

Communication in WSNs

Communication in WSNs takes place in the form of packet switching. Packet switching is a
method of grouping data that is transmitted over a digital network into packets. Packets are made
of a header and a payload. Data in the header are used by networking hardware to direct the packet
to its destination where the payload is extracted and used by application software. In simple words,
Packet Switching is the routing and transferring of data by means of addressed packets so that
a channel is occupied during the transmission of the packet only, and upon completion of the
transmission the channel is made available for the transfer of other traffic.

What is Routing and why is it necessary?

Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network or between or across multiple
networks. In packet switching networks, routing is the higher-level decision making that
directs network packets from their source toward their destination through intermediate network
nodes by specific packet forwarding mechanisms. Packet forwarding is the transit of network
packets from one network interface to another. Intermediate nodes are typically network
hardware devices such as routers, gateways, firewalls, or switches. The routing process usually
directs forwarding on the basis of routing tables. Routing tables maintain a record of the routes to
various network destinations. Routing tables may be specified by an administrator, learned by
observing network traffic or built with the assistance of routing protocols.

Routing Protocols

A routing protocol specifies how routers communicate with each other, distributing information
that enables them to select routes between any two nodes on a computer network. Routers perform
the "traffic directing" functions on the Internet; data packets are forwarded through the networks
of the internet from router to router until they reach their destination computer. Routing algorithms
determine the specific choice of route. Each router has a prior knowledge only of networks attached
to it directly. A routing protocol shares this information first among immediate neighbors, and then
throughout the network. This way, routers gain knowledge of the topology of the network. The
ability of routing protocols to dynamically adjust to changing conditions such as disabled data
lines and computers and route data around obstructions is what gives the Internet its survivability
and reliability.

The specific characteristics of routing protocols include the manner in which they avoid routing
loops, the manner in which they select preferred routes, using information about hop costs, the
time they require to reach routing convergence, their scalability, and other factors.

Formation of Clusters and Selection of Cluster Heads

WSNs Formation Techniques are of 2 types :

1. Centralized formation

2. Distributed formation
In Distributed formation techniques, the information is managed by each node and decisions are
locally taken and limited to its neighborhood (single-hop neighbors). The main characteristics of
distributed networks include the following:

(i) There are autonomous devices.

(ii) Each node shares information to its neighborhood.

(iii) It is suitable for distributed applications (multiagent systems, self-organized systems, etc.)

(iv) The information is mainly forwarded to a single node.

(v) Interconnection devices (routers, bridges, etc.) are not required.

(vi) Their flexibility allows targeting harsh environments.

One of the most important distributed techniques in recent years has been self-organization. A
sensor network using this strategy is able to achieve an emergent behavior in which nodes interact
individually and coordinate autonomously. The target is to achieve tasks that exceed its individual
capabilities as a single node. Some of the addressed metrics are network lifetime, loss of
messages, overhead, efficiency, latency, and reaction time (how much time it takes the data to get
to the sink node). The considered topologies in this work are flat-, cluster-, tree-, and chain-based.

Performance Evaluation of Topologies

According to the energy consumption, the chain-based topology saves more energy in comparison
with the other topologies. Flat topology is the worst because it possesses large latency with low
message losses; this technique does not take into account the energy constraints and it may cause
implosion and overlap, but it is better, with respect to overhead, than others since it does not keep
a defined structure.

Regarding reliability, the best topology is the cluster-based one, due to the easy reconfiguration,
scalability, low latency, and energy saving but the energy dissipation rate is highly different from
one sensor to another and network connectedness may not be guaranteed.
The chain-based topology is the most promising network for this study. The leader in a chain
topology acts as the sink; it saves more energy than cluster-based topologies and offers a larger
lifetime but spends much time in data collection and overhead is high. Tree topology saves more
energy than cluster-based topology, but when the formation of the tree is being developed it is
costly and consumes a lot of time, it is not resilient to node failures, power consumption is uneven
across network nodes, and the tree maintenance is high.

These observations do not consider reconfiguration techniques, the topology evaluation depends
completely on the kind of application, and the results are not absolute.

Cluster-based formation

Cluster-based control structures allow a more efficient use of resources. A hierarchical view of the
created network through clustering decreases the computational complexity in the formation of the
underlying network. On a topological level, clustering is achieved by grouping nodes inside a
certain transmission area. A designed leader node controls this group of nodes usually known as
Cluster Head (CH) or a leader node. A leader node is selected according to a weight that may
correspond to a node capability to perform additional duties. It can be determined by taking into
consideration aspects such as node residual energy, memory amount, processing capabilities, and
the number of neighbors. Usually, the weights are computed locally in each node, and they may
depend on the application where the structure is used.

Advantages and Limitations

The main advantages are as follows: the information is local; this means that a node only keeps
information of its neighborhood (one- or two-hop neighbors). Distributed algorithms are
considered scalable. Reconfiguration is made locally on the affected part; since nodes are
autonomous, the decisions are made by every node according to its position or its activities. The
priorities and available information in the network are defined by every role. When a node dies,
the network will remain in operation and the performance is not affected considerably. The
distributed approach allows dealing with noisy environments including obstacles. The energy
consumption is reduced by every node; usually, the routing starts whether an event is detected or
there is a target to follow; this implies that there is no unnecessary depletion of energy before the
procedure starts.

Some limitations of the distributed techniques are as follows: the connectivity of the entire network
cannot be assured, because nodes only have local information; when the transmission is by multi-
hop and there is only a sink node, bottlenecks can arise; nodes mobility requires more energy;
finally, the network stops when there is only one sink node.

Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols

Four Types:

• Table-driven (proactive) routing

• Maintains fresh lists of destinations and their routes by periodically distributing routing
tables throughout the network

• On-demand (reactive) routing

• Finds a route on demand by flooding the network with Route Request (RREQ) packets

• Hybrid (both proactive and reactive) routing

• Combines the advantages of proactive and reactive routing

• Hierarchical routing protocols

• The choice of proactive and of reactive routing depends on the hierarchic level in which a
node resides (cluster-based routing)