Scalable Coordination in Dynamic Sensor Networks (SCDSN)

Abstract

Recent advances in technology have led to development of low-cost, low-power, and multifunctional sensor nodes capable of sensing, computation and short-range wireless communications. The deployment of large colonies of sensor nodes coordinating among themselves to achieve a more complex sensing task, or simply sensor networks, promises sheer numbers of sensing applications.

However, coordination between sensor nodes, in order to communicate sensed events to observers, is by no means trivial and is more challenging than coordination between nodes in traditional wired and wireless networks. The difficulty stems from the unique characteristics of sensor networks including: lack of infrastructure awareness, large number of nodes in the network and more importantly the dynamics of network topology due to node mobility and node failures. While existing coordination protocols, like Directed Diffusion and Data-Centric Storage, operate well in relatively static environments, they incur high energy-consumption overhead and event loss in dynamic sensor networks.

This thesis proposes Scalable Coordination in Dynamic Sensor Networks (SCDSN), a coordination protocol that reduces event loss and minimizes energy consumption in dynamic sensor networks. The performance of the SCDSN routing protocol is evaluated using the ns-2 simulator and compared with a data-centric routing protocol, Directed Diffusion and a traditional ad hoc routing protocol, Ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing under various dynamic network topologies. The performance evaluation demonstrates that SCDSN achieves significant energy efficiency and minimizes event loss under various network dynamics.