Adaptive management of energy consumption, reliability and delay of wireless sensor node: Application to IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor node

Abstract

Designing a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to achieve a high Quality of Service (QoS) (network performance and durability) is a challenging problem. We address it by focusing on the performance of the 802.15.4 communication protocol because the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard is actually considered as one of the reference technologies in WSNs. In this paper, we propose to control the sustainable use of resources (i.e., energy consumption, reliability and timely packet transmission) of a wireless sensor node equipped with photovoltaic cells by an adaptive tuning not only of the MAC (Medium Access Control) parameters but also of the sampling frequency of the node. To do this, we use one of the existing control approaches, namely the viability theory, which aims to preserve the functions and the controls of a dynamic system in a set of desirable states. So, an analytical model, describing the evolution over time of nodal resources, is derived and used by a viability algorithm for the adaptive tuning of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol. The simulation analysis shows that our solution allows ensuring indefinitely, in the absence of hardware failure, the operations (lifetime duration, reliability and timely packet transmission) of an 802.15.4 WSN and one can temporarily increase the sampling frequency of the node beyond the regular sampling one. This latter brings advantages for agricultural and environmental applications such as precision agriculture, flood or fire prevention. Main results show that our current approach enable to send more information when critical events occur without the node runs out of energy. Finally, we argue that our approach is generic and can be applied to other types of WSN.

A Viability Approach For Management Of IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Node Performance

“…We note that the percentage of kernel achieved through our model is always higher than that of Kone et al [19] regardless of the amount of solar energy provided. Indeed, this situation is explained by the fact that our model, unlike theirs, takes into account possible disruptions such as fluctuations in solar energy levels and energy losses.…”

“…For this kind of application (monitoring), a new approach is defined and used in literature: the theory of viability [9], [15]- [18]. It has been applied for the first time in sensors network fields by Kone et al in [19]. They have shown that by defining a good actions' policy (controlling the evolution of sensor node over the time through the tunning of MAC parameters (MacMinBE and MacMaxCsmaBackoff) and sensing frequency), in general one could guarantee a good lifetime and quality of service that meet the application requirements related to monitoring activity, particularly in agri-environment field.…”

“…This involves knowing at every moment the level of energy remaining in the nodes' battery. In [19] the authors proposed a mathematical model describing energy's evolution overtime inside a sensor node's battery by the equation (05) below:…”

“…Indeed, in our case this value is 0.1 packets/s and this does not seem to be sufficient to meet both a minimum level of reliability (99%) and a delay less than 20ms. Indeed, as the authors of [19] have indicated, the denser the network is, the lower the frequency of sending and collecting data should be.…”

“…Figure 4 shows the evolution of the percentage of viability kernel obtained by the model proposed in [19] and ours, as a function of solar energy supplied by the photovoltaic panel. We have set the minimum reliability at 99% and the maximum delay to 50ms.…”