NETWORK PLANNING TOOL WITH TRAFFIC-ADAPTIVE PROCESSING FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Authors

Abstract

Some applications of Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in industrial sense and react scenarios, require fairly fast sampling rates. Considering that a few sensors may share a common sink, sharing part of their path on the way to the sink may result in undesirable message losses and delays that cannot be solved without modifying data communication rates. Our research focuses on planning a WSN to avoid excess traffic during sensing and acting to guarantee the minimal delay for critical scenarios. In this paper we propose an integrated approach to plan, test and reconfigure a network. Initially, our approach gives guidance for a base-plan for the network. With this first-cut plan we test the performance of the network and if necessary reconfigure it. The results of tests given are followed by traffic-level adjustments of the system by several possible techniques: adjustment of number of nodes, network partitions, reduction of the sampling rate or in-network processing with strategies such as aggregation techniques or in-node closed control loops. We evaluate experimentally the proposed approach with two different mechanisms of communication, and different levels of traffic, showing that our planning and reconfiguration allows users to make the best choices for the application context.

Keywords

WSN, Network planning, Measurement, Performance, Reliability

Subject

WSN, Planning

Conference

Sensornets 2012