Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Xiaojiang Du, Fengjing Lin Department of Computer Science North Dakota State University {Xiaojiang.Du, Fengjing.Lin}@ndsu.edu
Abstract
Most existing routing protocols consider homogeneous sensor networks, i.e., all sensor nodes have the same capabilities in terms of communication, computation, energy supply, etc. However, a homogeneous ad hoc network suffers from poor performance and scalability. Recent research has demonstrated its performance bottleneck both theoretically and through simulation experiments and testbed measurement. Furthermore, nodes in certain sensor networks are heterogeneous. In this paper, we propose to improve network performance by deploying heterogeneous sensor nodes. We design a novel routing protocol - Heterogeneous Sensor Routing (HSR) for heterogeneous sensor networks. The performance of HSR is evaluated through extensive simulation experiments. Our results show that HSR performs better than two popular routing protocols Directed Diffusion and Mesh. The primary functionality of wireless sensor networks is to sense the environment and transmit the acquired information to base stations for further processing. Thus, data dissemination (routing) is a fundamental and very important operation for sensor networks. Scalable and efficient data dissemination is challenging and critical for the successful operation of large-scale sensor networks. Potentially multiple, mobile base stations and mobile targets pose additional challenge to routing. The many-to-one communication pattern is dominant in sensor networks, and special multi-hop wireless routing protocols between sensor nodes and the sink are needed. Several routing protocols have been proposed for sensor networks, such as Directed Diffusion [1], TTDD [2], LEACH [3], Mesh [7], and so on. Most existing routing protocols consider homogeneous sensor networks, i.e., all sensor nodes have the same capabilities in terms of communication, computation, energy supply, etc. However, a homogeneous ad hoc network suffers from poor scalability. Recent research has demonstrated its performance bottleneck both theoretically (Gupta and Kumar [4] showed that the per node throughput in a homogeneous ad hoc network is 1 ( n log n ) , where n is the number of nodes), and through simulation experiments and testbed measurement [14]. Furthermore, nodes in some sensor networks are heterogeneous. For example, in a smart home environment, sensors may be powered by AA batteries, AAA batteries or even button batteries. In this paper, we propose to form heterogeneous sensor networks by deploying a small number of powerful High-end sensors (H-sensors) with large number of Low-end sensors (L-sensors). We design an efficient routing protocol for heterogeneous sensor networks. Our simulation studies show that network performance can be significantly improved by heterogeneous sensor networks.
1. Introduction
Recent advances in microprocessor and wireless communication technologies have enabled the deployment of large scale sensor networks where many low-power, low-cost small sensors are distributed over a vast field to obtain fine-grained, high-precision sensing data. These sensor nodes are typically powered by batteries and communicate through wireless channels, and are usually scattered densely and statically. Sensor networks can be used in many application areas such as military surveillance, environmental monitoring and target tracking. In sensor networks, a source is defined as a sensor node detecting a target and generating data to report the conditions of the target; a sink is defined as an end user or a base station that collects data from the sources. For a large sensor network, multi-hop data forwarding is typically used to reach a distant destination.
2. Related Works
Most existing works consider homogeneous sensor networks. However, a homogeneous sensor network suffers from poor performance and scalability. Moreover, in many applications, sensors are heterogeneous in terms of resources they possess. In this paper, we propose to improve network performance by deploying heterogeneous nodes in sensor networks. We consider a heterogeneous sensor network (HSN) with two types of nodes: a small number of powerful High-end sensors (H-sensors) and a large number of Low-end sensors (L-sensors). Cluster is formed around each H-sensor, which serves as the cluster head. L-sensors do the basic sensing as well as the relaying of packets since multi-hop communication is used within each cluster. H-sensors conduct data fusion within each cluster, and transmit the aggregated data to the sink via multi-hop (of H-sensors) communication. H-sensors may also participate in sensing. Since L-sensors communicate over short range, their hardware requirements are simple. On the other hand, H-sensors perform long range transmissions to other H-sensors, perform data aggregation, and coordinate MAC and routing within the clusters. Hence H-sensors have more complex hardware than L-sensors. Several existing works have considered heterogeneous sensor networks. In [6], Mhatre et al studied the optimum node density and node energies to guarantee a lifetime, while ensuring connectivity and coverage in heterogeneous sensor networks. The authors assume that each cluster head can directly communicate with the sink. However, this assumption is either invalid for large sensor networks, or too costly because of the very long transmission range of the cluster heads. We do not make such assumption. In our model cluster heads send data to the sink via multi-hop communications. We propose a novel routing protocol Heterogeneous Sensor Routing (HSR) for heterogeneous sensor networks. The HSR routing protocol is designed based on the following assumptions: Each sensor node is static and aware of its own location. Sensor nodes can use location services such as [11] to estimate their locations, and no GPS receiver is required at each node. For simplicity, we consider there is only one sink in the network. Our routing protocol applies to sensor networks with multiple sinks. Initially, the sink floods its location to all cluster heads. In this paper, we only consider fixed sink, and we focus on studying the performance improvement via deploying heterogeneous sensor nodes. The HSR routing protocol is essentially a clustering-based algorithm. Several clustering-based
routing protocols have been proposed for sensor networks, such as LEACH [3], TTDD [2], etc. The major differences between HSR and these clusteringbased protocols are: (1) In HSR, physically more powerful H-sensors are the cluster heads, while other protocols need an algorithm to elect cluster heads. (2) In HSR, cluster heads and cluster structure are fixed, while in [2, 3] different nodes are selected as cluster heads at different time and frequent re-clustering introduces large overhead.
cluster heads are the nuclei of the Voronoi cells. An example of the cluster formation is shown in Figure 1. The above cluster formation approach works not only for sensor field being a two-dimension plane, but also for different geographic terrain. Since during the cluster formation, nodes select cluster heads based on signal strength, instead of distance. In the following, we will present the routing schemes within a cluster and from cluster heads to the sink.
protocol (for instance, 802.11 has such function), the above passive acknowledgement scheme is unnecessary. The transmitted data packet has to be kept in the buffer before its receipt has been confirmed. The acknowledgement scheme reduces the impact of node failure and channel error. 4. If R1 does not get any acknowledgement within a time period, R1 will re-transmit the packet to R2 once. And if the retransmission fails, R1 will use a backup path. 5. A backup path is set up as follows. The current cluster head (say R1 ) draws a straight line L between itself and the sink S, and line L intersects with several cells Cl' ,..., Ck' 1 , Ck . If the next cell is the cell with the failed cluster head, R1 will use a detoured path to avoid the cell. Otherwise, the set of new cells Cl' ,..., Ck' 1 , Ck will be the new Relay Cells. And the packet is forwarded to the sink according to the above steps. 6. This process continuous until the packet reaches the sink. An example of inter-cluster routing is shown in Figure 2, where cluster head in cell C0 wants to send data packets to the sink, which is the square at the topright corner. A straight line from the source cluster head to the sink is used to determine the original Relay Cells: cells C0 , C1 , C2 , C3 . If the cluster head in cell C2 is not available, the cluster head in cell C1 will use a backup ' path C2 , C3 to connect the sink.
perform the similar operations. If a cluster head already sent the average temperature of its cluster (via another routing path), it will not send its average data again. Ideally, the sink could selectively query several clusters, such that all the clusters will be covered by the routes from these clusters to sink, and with a small number of overlapping of the clusters. Thus the average data can be computed more efficiently. For other aggregation functions, like Max, Min, the in-network processing at cluster heads can also significantly reduce the amount of data needs to be transmitted, and thus save lots of energy for sensor networks. Increasing Throughput. Heterogeneous sensor nodes can increase network throughput. In [12], Duarte-Melo and Liu showed that the maximum per node throughput in a many-to-one wireless network is upper bounded by W/n, where W is the transmission capacity of the nodes that directly communicate with the sink, and n is the total number of sensor nodes. In HSR, only cluster heads communicate with the sink. Cluster heads are powerful high-end sensors and have much larger transmission capacity (W) than the transmission capacity (W) of L-sensors. Thus, heterogeneous sensor nodes can increase network throughput.
data packet per second. Each data packet is 32 bytes. The transmission range of a H-sensor and a L-sensor is 100m and 20m respectively. For the following simulation tests, unless we are varying the parameter in a test, the default settings are: The probability of Lsensor failure is 0.1; the probability of H-sensor failure is 0.05; the channel error rate is 0.1.
4. Performance Evaluation
We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the Heterogeneous Sensor Routing (HSR) through experiments. We compare HSR with the following two routing schemes. 1. A popular sensor network routing protocol Directed Diffusion [1]. 2. Mesh [7]. The basic idea is to let each data packet carry a credit, which specifies the amount of extra cost allowed beyond the source nodes minimum cost to the sink node. Multiple copies of a data packet can go along different paths that interweave and form a mesh. In our test, we set the extra credit to be 0.5. I.e., all the paths with hop number less than 1.5 times the lowest hop count will be used to forward data. We implemented the HSR routing protocol in QualNet. For comparison, Directed Diffusion and Mesh were also implemented in QualNet. The MAC protocol is IEEE 802.11 DCF. The default simulation testbed has 4 sinks and 300 sensor nodes randomly distributed in a 300m x 300m area. For HSR, there are 25 H-sensors and 275 L-sensors. For Directed Diffusion and Mesh, all the 300 nodes are L-sensors. Each simulation run lasts for 600 seconds, and each result is averaged over five random network topologies. 50 source nodes are selected for each simulation run. A source generates one
Figure 3. Delivery Ratio Vs Node Density In HSR, L-sensors send data packets to their cluster heads, which are only a few hops away, thus the chance of packet lost is small. Then the cluster heads forward the packets to the sink. Since cluster heads are more powerful nodes with large transmission range, the hop count to the sink is small, and the packet forwarding is less affected by node or link failures. In Mesh, when node density is low, the source may not find multiple paths to the sink, and the hop count (via L-sensors) is larger than HSR. Any node or link failure in the path can cause the packet lost, and the delivery ratio is not high. In Directed Diffusion, the hop count (via Lsensors) from source to sink is large, and the chance of broken route is large, so the delivery ratio is not high
either. The delivery ratios under all the three routing protocols increase as the node density increases. When node density is high, there are more nodes available for data forwarding, and this increases the delivery ratio. The total energy consumptions of the three protocols under different node density are reported in Figure 4. The energy consumption of HSR is lower than both Directed Diffusion and Mesh. Although in HSR the transmissions among cluster heads consume more energy than the transmissions among L-sensors, HSR does not have route discovery phase that consumes lots of energy. In addition, the average number of transmissions in HSR is much smaller than in Directed Diffusion and Mesh. Mesh uses route discovery to find multiple paths to the sink, and discovering route consumes lots of energy. Also in Mesh, several copies of one data packet are sent via different paths to the sink, which means more nodes are involved in one data delivery, thus consumes more energy. The number of nodes participating in Mesh routing increase as node density increases, thus the total energy consumption of Mesh increases faster than Directed Diffusion and HSR as node density increases. In Directed Diffusion, route discovery introduces large routing overhead and consume lots of energy, thats why Directed Diffusion has higher energy consumption than HSR.
small number of cluster-head hops in HSR, thus the delivery ratio under HSR remains high even when the source-sink distance is large. For Mesh and Directed Diffusion, the packet is forwarded by L-sensors, and large source-sink distance means much more hops and larger chance of node or link failures, thus lower delivery ratio. The energy consumptions for different source-sink distances are shown in Figure 6. The total energy consumed by the three schemes increases as distance increases. However, the increase of Directed Diffusion is much faster than Mesh and HSR. As the source-sink distance increases, much more nodes are involved in route discovery of Directed Diffusion, thus more energy is consumed. Similarly, in Mesh there are more nodes forwarding packets when source-sink distance increases. While in HSR, large source-sink distance only means one or two more cluster heads are involved in packet forwarding, so the energy consumption increases slowly.
starts saturation when the traffic load is heavy, and the throughput actually decreases when traffic load is larger than 250 kbits/sec. In Mesh and Directed Diffusion, Lsensors are used to forward packets, and L-sensors have limited communication and computation capabilities. When network traffic is heavy, congestion happens and packets are dropped in the network, thus cause the throughput decreases. In HSR, packets are delivered mainly by cluster heads, which have larger bandwidth than L-sensors. There is no congestion and few packets are drops in HSR, thus the throughput in HSR is very high.
5. Conclusions
Most existing work considers homogeneous sensor networks. However, a homogeneous ad hoc network suffers from poor performance and scalability. In this paper, we propose to improve network performance by using heterogeneous sensor nodes. A heterogeneous sensor network is formed by deploying a small number of powerful high-end sensors and a large number of low-end sensors. Clusters are formed in the sensor network and H-sensors are the cluster heads. L-sensors send data to their cluster heads, and cluster heads send the data to the sink via multi-hop transmissions over cluster heads. We designed a novel routing protocol Heterogeneous Sensor Routing (HSR) for heterogeneous sensor networks. Long-range transmissions are performed by powerful cluster heads, and L-sensors only send packets to the nearby cluster heads. HSR saves significant amount of energy for sensor nodes and hence increases network lifetime. HSR also increases network throughput. Extensive simulations demonstrate that HSR performs better than two popular sensor network routing protocols Directed Diffusion and Mesh.
References:
[1] C. Intanagonwiwat, R. Govindan and D. Estrin, Directed Diffusion: A Scalable and Robust Communication Paradigm for Sensor Networks, ACM MOBICOM00, Boston, MA, Aug. 2000. [2] F. Ye, H. Luo, J. Cheng, S. Lu and L. Zhang, A Two tier Data Dissemination Model for Large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks, ACM MOBICOM02, Atlanta, GA, Sept. 2002. [3] W. Heinzelman, et al, Energy-Efficient Communication Protocols for Wireless Microsensor Networks, Proc. Hawaiians Int'l Conf. on Systems Science, January 2000. [4] P. Gupta and P. R. Kumar, The Capacity of Wireless Networks, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. IT-46, no. 2, pp. 388-404, March 2000.
[5] D. Tian and N. Georganas, Energy Efficient Routing with Guaranteed Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE WCNC 2003. [6] V. Mhatre, et al, A Minimum Cost Heterogeneous Sensor Network with a Lifetime Constraint, accepted for publication in IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing, January 2004. [7] F.Ye, S. Lu, and L.Zhang. Gradient Broadcast: A Robust, Long lived Sensor Network. Http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers /grab-techreports.ps, 2001. [8] I. Stojmenovic and X. Lin. Loop-free hybrid single-path flooding routing algorithms with guaranteed delivery for wireless networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 12(10):1023-1032, 2001. [9] Wei Ye, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin, An EnergyEfficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, INFOCOM 2002. [10] B. Karp and H. T. Kung. Gpsr: greedy perimeter stateless routing for wireless networks. In Proceedings of the 6th annual
international conference on Mobile computing and networking, pages 243-254, 2000. [11] A. Savvides, C. Han, and M. Strivastava. Dynamic finegrained localization in ad-hoc networks of sensors. In Proc. of ACM MOBICOM01, pg 166179. ACM Press, 2001. [12] J. Duarte-Melo and M. Liu, Data-gathering wireless sensor networks: organization and capacity, Computer Networks, Vol 43, Issue 4, pp. 519-537, November 2003. [13] F. Kuhn, R. Wattenhofer, and A. Zollinger, Worst-Case Optimal and Average-Case Efficient Geometric Ad-Hoc Routing. In Proc. 4th ACM Int. Symposium on Mobile AdHoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc), 2003. [14] K. Xu, X. Hong, M. Gerla, An Ad Hoc Network with Mobile Backbones, IEEE ICC 2002, New York, NY, Apr. 2002. .