Efficient Information Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks using Mobile Sinks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks constitute an emerging technology that has received recently significant attention both from industry and academia. On the one hand, there is an ever-widening range of attractive applications (e.g., disaster and environmental monitoring, wildlife habitat monitoring, target tracking, intrusion detection, security surveillance) sensor networks can be used for. On the other hand, sensor networks are self-organizing ad-hoc systems where optimized energy consumption is of paramount importance; therefore, relaying information between sensors and a sink node, possibly over multiple wireless hops, in an energy-efficient manner is a challenging task that preoccupies the research community for some time now. Optimizing energy consumption in wireless sensor networks is of paramount importance. Sensors are tiny devices with sensing, processing, and transmitting capabilities; they are of low cost, but have a consequently low storage and computational capacity, and a limited energy supply. It is usually considered impossible or impractical (from a technical or economical point of view) to recharge their batteries; thus, they should be managed in such a way to ensure the unattended operation of the network for a long enough time period (e.g., several months). There is a recent trend to deal with this problem by introducing mobile elements (sensors or sink nodes) in the network. The majority of these approaches assume time-driven scenarios. However, there are several real-life applications for which an event-based is more appropriate. In this paper we propose to adaptively move the sink node inside the covered region, according to the evolution of current events, so as to minimize the energy consumption of the dissemination of the event-related data. Both analytical and simulation results are given.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA478774

Entities

People

  • Attila Vidacs
  • Rolland Vida
  • Zoltan Vincze

Organizations

  • Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Boundaries
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Energy Consumption
  • Energy Efficiency
  • Energy Levels
  • Intrusion
  • Intrusion Detection
  • Monitoring
  • Optimization
  • Random Walk
  • Sensor Networks
  • Simulations
  • Target Tracking
  • Wireless Sensor Networks

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Educational Psychology
  • Sensor Fusion and Tracking Systems.