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A Communication Paradigm for Hybrid Sensor/Actuator Networks*

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Abstract

This paper investigates an anycast communication service for a hybrid sensor/actuator network, consisting of both resource-rich and resource-impoverished devices. The key idea is to exploit the capabilities of resource-rich devices (called micro-servers) to reduce the communication burden on smaller, energy, bandwidth and memory constrained sensor nodes. The goal is to deliver sensor data to the nearest micro-server, which can (i) store it (ii) forward it to other micro-servers using out-of-band communication or (iii) perform the desired actuation. We propose and evaluate a reverse tree-based anycast mechanism tailored to deal with the unique event dynamics in sensor networks. Our approach is to construct an anycast tree rooted at each potential event source, which micro-servers can dynamically join and leave. Our anycast mechanism is self-organizing, distributed, robust, scalable, routing-protocol independent and incurs very little overhead. Simulations using Network Simulator (ns-2) show that: our anycast mechanism when added to Directed Diffusion can reduce the network’s energy consumption by more than 50%; can reduce both the mean end-to-end latency of the transmission and the mean number of transmissions by more than 50%; achieves 99% data delivery rate for low and moderate micro-server mobility rate; and handles network dynamics reasonably well.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of NSW Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Wen Hu & Sanjay Jha

  2. Networks and Pervasive Computing Program, National ICT Australia Limited, Bay 15, Locomotive Workshop, Australian Technology Park, Garden Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 1430, Australia

    Wen Hu & Sanjay Jha

  3. Department of Computer Science, Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University Portland, OR, 97207-0751, USA

    Nirupama Bulusu

Authors
  1. Wen Hu
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  2. Nirupama Bulusu
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  3. Sanjay Jha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wen Hu.

Additional information

This paper is a comprehensive extension of our earlier work in [1].

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Hu, W., Bulusu, N. & Jha, S. A Communication Paradigm for Hybrid Sensor/Actuator Networks*. Int J Wireless Inf Networks 12, 47–59 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-005-5154-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-005-5154-5

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