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Differentiated service strategies for ad-hoc wireless sensor networks in harsh communication environments

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Abstract

In some wireless sensor network applications, sensor nodes will be deployed in harsh communication environments. In such environments, the deployment may not be adequately controlled, and nodes may have to communicate with a single destination node. For nodes to alert the destination on critical data that has been sensed, in addition to the harsh communication environment, contention resulting from both the deployment and network density must be appropriately overcome. In this paper, we create theoretical models for the behavior of Timeout-MAC (T-MAC) protocol, and evaluate five possible solutions, each designed to be easy to implement on a device by simply tuning T-MAC parameters, so as to overcome these environment-specific issues and effectively alert the destination to critical data. Our results indicate that slight changes to the behavior of the network can improve the awareness of the destination to critical regions in the environment, and that these changes have different levels of effectiveness at different network densities.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for detailed comments and suggestions on improving this work. This work is based in part, upon research supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. CNS-0619069, CNS-0855248, EPS-0701890, and OISE 0729792). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA

    Jesse D. Thomason

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, 72204, USA

    Kenji Yoshigoe

  3. Department of Mathematics, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, 72035, USA

    R. B. Lenin

  4. College of Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO, 65409, USA

    James M. Bridges

  5. Industrial Software Systems, ABB Corporate Research, Bangalore, 560048, India

    Srini Ramaswamy

Authors
  1. Jesse D. Thomason
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  2. Kenji Yoshigoe
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  3. R. B. Lenin
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  4. James M. Bridges
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  5. Srini Ramaswamy
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Correspondence to Kenji Yoshigoe.

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Thomason, J.D., Yoshigoe, K., Lenin, R.B. et al. Differentiated service strategies for ad-hoc wireless sensor networks in harsh communication environments. Wireless Netw 18, 551–564 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-012-0418-3

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