Linear wireless sensor networks: Classification and applications☆
Introduction
The advent of technology in computing and electronics evolving innovation of tiny wireless sensors has opened an unprecedented opportunity for a wide array of real-time applications. In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been emerging as a new suitable tool for a spectrum of new applications. These tiny sensor nodes are low cost, low power, easily deployable, and are self-organizing. They are usually capable of doing limited local processing. However, information collected from a large number of such nodes at a central location known as base stations (BSs) or sink nodes, before reaching a network control center (NCC) enables detailed representation of a given physical environment. Thus, a WSN can be described as a collection of sensor nodes which collaborate to arrive at some specific decision. Unlike traditional networks, a WSN depend on dense deployment and adequate co-ordination of data transfer to a BS. These unique characteristics make it very useful. WSNs were initially introduced for defense applications such as target detection, surveillance of enemy activities in a battlefield environment and counterterrorism. However, their advantages over traditional networks have resulted in many other potential civilian applications that range from infrastructure security to industrial control. Some examples are environment and habitat monitoring, health applications, home automation, traffic control, etc. Another possible example is protecting and monitoring a large pipeline system.
Research in the field of WSNs is relatively active and involves a number of interrelated issues, including efficient routing protocols (Akkaya and Younis, 2005, Akkaya and Younis, 2003, Akyildiz et al., 2002, Chong and Kumar, 2003, He et al., 2003, Schurgers and Srivastava, 2001, Soharabi and Pottie, 2000), QoS support (Jawhar and Wu, 2005), security (Fernandez et al., 2005), and middleware (Hadim et al., 2006). Most of these are investigated under the assumption that the network used for sensors does not have any infrastructure support. Fortunately, WSN needed for a monitoring linear infrastructures ought to be a structured network in which all sensor nodes are to be placed in a line. This characteristic can be utilized for enhancing the communication sequencing and reliability of the network.
We define LSNs as a new category of WSNs where the nodes are placed in a strictly linear or semi-linear form. A WSN is considered linear if one of the following conditions are true: (1) if all the nodes are aligned on a straight line, strictly forming a line, or thin LSN; (2) if all of the nodes exist between two parallel lines that extend for a relatively long distance as compared to their transmitting range and the distance separating them constitute a semi-linear or thick LSN. We introduced a general concept of LSNs along with some specialized routing protocols and addressing scheme in Jawhar et al., 2007, Jawhar et al., 2009.
The alignment of sensor nodes in a linear form can be used in many applications such as monitoring and surveillance of international boundaries for illegal crossing, or smuggling activities, monitoring of roads, or long pipelines carrying oil, gas and water resources, river environmental monitoring, etc. (Jawhar et al., 2007). This architecture utilizes a linear structure to address communication sequencing, reliability, and security problems. The objective of the design is to reduce the installation and maintenance costs, increase the network reliability and fault tolerance, enhance the battery life for sensors, and reduce end-to-end communication delay for better quality of service (QoS) support of sensitive data.
The contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows:
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Identify and define LSNs, which constitute special class of WSNs.
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Present sample applications of LSNs.
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Outline the reasons and motivation behind the need for new architectures and protocols for LSNs.
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Distinguish different possible control classes that indicate different types of LSNs from a topological and hierarchical points of views.
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Present a case study which illustrates a design with associated protocols that increase the efficiency and robustness of routing.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of related work in this field. Section 3 introduces some important applications for wireless LSNs. Section 4 discusses the reasons why new architectures and protocols are desirable for LSNs. Section 5 provides a topological and hierarchical classification of LSNs. Sections 6 offers a basic algorithm for routing messages in LSNs and Section 7 presents simulation experiments, which evaluate its performance under various network conditions. The last section concludes the paper and provides future directions for further research.
Section snippets
Related work
Akkaya and Younis (2005) provide a survey of routing protocols in WSNs. They identify three types of such protocols: data centric, hierarchical, and location-based. The data centric protocols include flooding, gossiping, directed diffusion, energy-aware, rumor, and gradient-based. The hierarchical protocols include LEACH (low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy), PEGASIS (power-efficient gathering in sensor information systems), and APTEEN (adaptive threshold sensitive energy efficient sensor
Applications of linear wireless sensor networks
This section presents a list of potential applications for LSNs.
Why new architectures and protocols are needed?
There are many reasons why a new framework is needed for different types of LSNs.
Topological and hierarchical classification of LSNs
From the topological point of view, LSNs can be divided into several categories according to the linearity of different levels of the node hierarchy: thin, thick and very thick. This section presents these categories and discusses the characteristics and limitation of each one of them. In addition, from the hierarchical point of view, LSNs can be classified into several categories: one-level, two-level, and three-level LSNs. This classification depends on the way sensors and the communication
A basic algorithm for routing of messages in LSNs
As presented earlier, the main routing process of data messages is done at the DRN-to-DRN level. It is important to note that the classical routing protocols for wireless networks such as DSR and AODV are not used due to the fact that they are designed for multi-dimensional topologies and do not take advantage of the linear structure that is assumed. For example, DSR and AODV both use flooding from the source in order to discover paths to the destination. This is not necessary in our LSN once
Simulation
As a case study, we compared the performance of one thin and two thick three-level LSNs with varying node densities per distance unit. We define DDRN as the distance between two consecutive DRNs in the thin LSN, which is the unit of length in the simulation. The distance DDRN varies depending on the communication protocol used for DRN-to-DRN communication. For the IEEE 802.15.14 (Zigbee) protocol, which is used by most sensor networks, the commonly used transmission range is 10 m. The segment
Conclusions and future research
In this paper, LSNs, which constitute a new and specific category of WSNs, are presented. The paper discussed some of the applications that exhibit this kind of linear alignment and motivated the need for more research in this important area. Such research involves the design and testing of different networking and communication protocols which take advantage of the linearity of the network in order to increase the communication efficiency, energy savings, reliability and fault tolerance. In
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A primary version of some parts of this paper were presented in the Eighth Wireless Telecommunication Symposium (WTS'09), published by the IEEE Communication Society. This work was partially supported by UAEU Research Grant 03-03-9-11/08.