Self‐stabilising hybrid connectivity control protocol for WSNs

Abstract

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.

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“…Singh and Nagaraju [28] proposed a Sink-As-CH strategy [29]- [31] to help reduce number of intermediary hops. Sensor nodes are assigned to clusters according to their Euclidean distance to the sink.…”

“…We use a scheme similar to the one proposed for the clustering process inside the CONSTRUCT protocol [31]. Note that each cluster is identified by its Cluster Head ID (CHID); hence, each node knows the cluster it belongs to.…”

“…Moreover, when two CHs move next to each other, the one with less cluster mates will eventually lose its role and become a new cluster mate; ties are randomly broken Figure 2 depicts the different statuses applicable to each node in a section of the network after the cluster formation phase. Equation ( 1) helps calculate the CH's fitness score; where , , , , ( ) n Ei Er CC S t respectively denote the number of its neighbours, its residual energy, its initial energy, its clustering coefficient and its stability index (see [31] for details).…”

CHEAP: An Efficient Localized Area Coverage Maintenance Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Nodes will optimize their ranges using any scheme of the literature [63][64][65] upon reaching destination and timer t move (u) expiration. Redundant nodes will eventually enter into sleep state.…”