In this study, the authors address the problem of combining hierarchical and flat techniques to construct and maintain nodes' connectivity as well as links' symmetry (bidirectionality) in a wireless sensor network (WSN) comprising static nodes. They propose a localised and asynchronous self-stabilising hybrid message passing a solution that seamlessly merges three well known connectivity control techniques for such ad hoc networks, namely k-hop clustering (k ≥ 1), power control (transmission range adjustment) and sleep/wake scheduling. Their stigmergy-based strategy (i.e. inspired from ants' pheromone-based communication, division of labour and swarming behaviours) allows a WSN to simultaneously cope with issues such as scalability, fault tolerance, transmission range minimisation, energy hole problem (i.e. premature node deaths in the vicinity of the sink), channel overhearing and signalisation reduction. To the best of their knowledge, such a solution does not exist in the literature. The few self-stabilising hybrid connectivity control protocols currently proposed use only two of the above-mentioned techniques. The authors formally prove the correctness of their scheme and its self-stabilisation property under an unfair distributed daemon. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has a low average convergence time, is energy efficient and can prolong network lifetime.
Wireless sensor nodes are designed to collect information about their immediate environment. Once gathered, such data are forwarded via a multi-hop communication pattern to a remote gateway, also known as the sink. This process referred to as the convergecast may often require several sinks in order to improve network efficiency and resilience. Provided that load among the latter nodes are well balanced and packet losses are mitigated. This paper aims to design such a protocol by combining clustering, path-vector routing and sinks’ duty cycle scheduling schemes to help balance load and minimize message overhead. Simulation results proved that this solution outperforms DMS-RP (Dynamic Multi-Sink Routing Protocol), a recent state-ofthe-art contribution, in terms of delay minimization, packet delivery and network lifetime enhancement.
Connectivity construction is the main phase of a communicationoriented topology control process. It consists of improving the current network physical topology while preserving important properties such as connectivity and symmetry. In this paper, we address the problem of combining two of the techniques commonly used for this purpose in networks composed of a large number of energy constrained wireless sensor-nodes namely, clustering and power control. We propose an ant colony-based asynchronous and localized protocol that helps to significantly reduce energy losses by simultaneously eliminating redundant and poor quality links, always keeping the Cluster Head-to-member distance up to khops (k≥1) and minimizing signalization. Simulation results show that our protocol outperforms some state-of-the-art solutions in terms of Quality of the Topology (QoT) and network lifetime prolongation.
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