CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1. Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs) are the key to gathering the information, which is
a new class of networking technology in which collection of nodes is organized into a
cooperative network. Each node consists of processing capability (one or more micro
controllers, CPUs or DSP chips), may contain multiple types of memory (program,
data and flash memories), have a RF transceiver, usually with a single or omni-
directional antenna, a power source (e.g., batteries and solar cells), and accommodate
various sensors and actuators.

Figure 1.1 Architecture of Wireless Sensor Network

WSNs are low-cost, low-power, multi-functional miniature sensor devices, which can
observe and react to changes in physical phenomena of their surrounding
environments. When networked together over a wireless medium, these devices can
provide an overall result of their sensing functionality. Wireless sensors are equipped
 Chapter 1. Introduction

with a radio transceiver and a set of transducers through which they acquire
information about the surrounding environment. When deployed in large quantities in
a sensor field, these sensors can automatically organize themselves to form an ad hoc
multi-hop network to communicate with each other and with one or more sink nodes.
A remote user can inject commands into the sensor network via the sink to assign data
collection; processing and transfer tasks to the sensors, and it can later receive the
data sensed by the network through the sink. A sensor network is composed of a large
number of sensor nodes that are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or
very close to it. The position of sensor nodes need not be engineered or
predetermined. This allows random deployment in inaccessible terrains or disaster
relief operations. On the other hand, this also means that sensor network protocols and
algorithms must possess self-organizing capabilities. Another unique feature of sensor
networks is the cooperative effort of sensor nodes. Sensor nodes are fitted with an
onboard processor. Instead of sending the raw data to the nodes responsible for the
fusion, they use their processing abilities to locally carry out simple computations and
transmit only the required and partially processed data. WSNs are actually a number
of independent systems, having each one or more sensing devices. These systems are
able to communicate together through the use of wireless links. These networks must
be easy to deploy and auto-configurable, and are usually battery-operated.WSNs are
specialized for environmental monitoring. They are composed of a set of (tiny)
devices (called nodes or sensors), each of which is a micro system comprising a
processor, a memory, a set of transducers, and a low-range, low bandwidth radio
transceiver. Sensors are powered by on board batteries thus their lifetime is limited
and their energy efficiency is critical in most applications. Typical applications of
Sensor Networks include environment sampling, disaster areas monitoring, health
monitoring, surveillance, security, inventory management, and they have also been
envisioned as an architectural support for applications of pervasive computing. The
Sensors can be easily deployed in the environment (sensing field) and they self
organize to form a (multi hop) wireless network. They can be programmed to sample
parameters of the surrounding environment, to process sampled data and to forward
this information to a sink node, which, in turn, provides connectivity between the
network and the user. Trivial data gathering applications request sensors to forward
periodic samples to the sink node, which performs data processing. However in more
sophisticate, the network itself performs paradigms data processing. These approaches

2
 Chapter 1. Introduction

generally results in saving energy since a smaller amount of data needs to be

transmitted and radio transmissions use an important fraction of the energy budget of
the nodes. A major issue, in this approach, is related to the injection of sensing tasks
in the network. Some of the earlier methods suggest the use of database paradigms
and query languages (generally SQL-like), to interact with sensor networks. A query
submitted (or injected) to the sensor network specifies the sensing and data processing
tasks to be performed by the network itself. With this paradigm, the database to be
queried is the physical environment where the wireless sensor network is deployed.
This database is highly dynamic and it is not persistent. In fact, measured data change
continuously and if a data is missed (for instance temperature is not acquired in a
certain instant) it is missed forever. Measurable physical parameters of the real world
form a continuous flow of data that can be filtered, processed, and cross related by the
wireless sensor network. Some of the application areas where Sensor Networks are
used include medicine, agriculture, environment, military, inventory monitoring,
intrusion detection, motion tracking, machine malfunction, toys and many others, the
medical field Sensor Networks can be used to remotely and unobtrusively monitor
physiological parameters of patients such as heartbeat or blood pressure, and report to
the hospital when some parameters are altered. In agriculture they can he used to
monitor climatic conditions of different zones of a large cultivated area and calculate
different water or chemicals needs. Pollution detection systems can also benefit from
sensor networks. Sensors can monitor the current levels of polluting substances in a
town or a river and identify the source of anomalous situations, if any. Similar
detection systems can be employed to monitor rain and water levels and prevent
flooding, fire or other natural disasters. Another possible application area where
WSNs are being used is the monitoring of animal species and collection of data
concerning their habits, population, or position. Sensors can be deployed to
continuously report environmental data for long periods of time. This is a very
important improvement with respect to previous operating conditions where humans
had to operate in the fields and periodically take manual measurements resulting in
fewer data, higher errors, higher costs and non negligible interference with life
conditions of the observed species. In structure health monitoring applications Sensor
Networks are deployed on structures such as bridges, buildings, aircrafts, rockets or
other military equipment requiring continuous monitoring to ensure reliability and
safety. Sensor Networks can be used to detect and locate damages as well as predict

3
 Chapter 1. Introduction

remaining life more effectively and economically with respect to traditional

monitoring systems. The military can take advantage of Sensor Network technology
too. They can deploy such networks behind enemy lines and observe
movements/presence of troops and/or collect geographical information on the
deployment area. Other possible fields include home/office automation, education,
inventory monitoring, intrusion detection, motion tracking, machine malfunctions,
toys and many others. A Wireless Sensor is characterized by its small size, its ability
to sense environmental phenomena through a set of transducers and a radio
transceiver with autonomous power supply. Current low-end sensors employ low cost
Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) micro controllers with a small program and
data memory size (about 100 KB) Common on-board I/O buses and devices include
serial lines such as the Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART),
analog to digital converters and timers. There are two methods for the design of
transducer equipment. The most general approach has been used in Crossbow [1].
This method consists of developing transducer boards that can be attached (and
possibly stacked one on top of the other) to the main micro controller board through
an expansion bus. These transducer boards provide light, temperature, microphone,
sound detector, and accelerometer and magnetometer devices. The other approach is
followed by [2]. In this method, the transducers are directly put on the micro
controller boards. Transducers are soldered or can be mounted if needed, these on
board transducers can reduce production costs and are more robust than transducer
boards which may detach from the micro controller board in harsh environments. By
means of the transceiver circuitry a sensor unit communicates with nearby units.
Wireless Sensors use two types of radios; the first one is the simplest (and cheaper)
which offers a basic Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) Medium Access Control
(MAC) protocol, operates in a license free band (315/433/868/916 MHz) and has a
bandwidth in the range 20-50 Kbps. The other category in sensors supports an
802.15.4 radio operating in the 2.4 GHz band and offering a 250 Kbps bandwidth.
The latter offers the possibility of using an internal (i.e., on-board) antenna, which
makes sensor more manageable and self-contained with respect to an external whip
antenna. The radio range varies with a maximum of about 300 m (outdoor) for the
first radio type and 125 in for the 802.15.4 radios. Batteries that can be replaced upon
expiration power sensors. Battery size usually determines the size of the sensor, so
existing hardware is roughly a few cubic centimeters in size. Wireless Sensor

4
 Chapter 1. Introduction

Networks use Tiny OS [3] as its Operating System, which is a simple lightweight
event-based operating system. It supports the task concept: an execution entity that
runs up to completion without being preempted by other tasks and can post other
tasks. Only interrupt service routines can interrupt a running task. Lengthy operations
like reading from a transducer or sending a radio message are split-phase: the
requesting task invokes a command that starts the operation and immediately returns.
The various layers of Wireless Sensor Networks use two standards. One is the ZigBee
and 802.15.4 standard and the other is the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The ZigBee
Alliance [4] is an association of companies working together to develop standards
(and products) for reliable, cost-effective, low-power wireless networking. ZigBee
technology is embedded in a wide range of products and applications across
consumer, commercial, industrial and government markets worldwide, ZigBee builds
upon the IEEE 802.15.4 standard [5] which defines the physical and MAC layers for
low cost, low rate personal area networks. ZigBee defines the network layer
specifications for star, tree and peer-to-peer network topologies and provides a
framework for application programming in the application layer.

1.2. Applications
Following are some major applications of WSNs.

1.2.1. Area Monitoring

Area monitoring is a common application of WSNs. In area monitoring, the WSN is
deployed over a region where some phenomenon is to be monitored. A military
example is the use of sensors to detect enemy intrusion; a civilian example is the geo-
fencing of gas or oil pipelines. When the sensors detect the event being monitored
(heat, pressure), the event is reported to one of the base stations, which then takes
appropriate action (e.g., send a message on the internet or to a satellite). Similarly,
WSNs can use a range of sensors to detect the presence of vehicles ranging from
motorcycles to train cars.

1.2.2. Air Pollution Monitoring

WSNs are deployed in several cities to monitor the concentration of dangerous gases
for citizens.

5
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.2.3. Forest Fires Detection

A network of sensor nodes can be installed in a forest to control when a fire has
started. The nodes will be equipped with sensors to control temperature, humidity and
gases, which are produced by fire in the trees or vegetation. The early detection is
crucial for a successful action of the firefighters; thanks to WSNs, the fire brigade will
be able to know when a fire is started and how it is spreading.

1.2.4. Greenhouse Monitoring

WSNs are used to control the temperature and humidity levels inside commercial
greenhouses. When the temperature and humidity drops below specific levels, the
greenhouse manager must be notified via e-mail or cell phone text message, or host
systems can trigger misting systems, open vents, turn on fans, or control a wide
variety of system responses.

1.2.5. Landslide Detection

A landslide detection system makes use of a wireless sensor network to detect the
slight movements of soil and changes in various parameters that may occur before or
during a landslide. And through the data gathered it may be possible to know the
occurrence of landslides long before it actually happens.

1.2.6. Machine Health Monitoring

WSNs have been developed for machinery condition-based maintenance as they offer
significant cost savings and enable new functionalities. In wired systems, the
installation of enough sensors is often limited by the cost of wiring. Previously
inaccessible locations, rotating machinery, hazardous or restricted areas, and mobile
assets can now be reached with wireless sensors.

1.2.7. Water/Wastewater Monitoring

There are many opportunities for using WSNs within the water/wastewater industries.
Facilities not wired for power or data transmission can be monitored using industrial
wireless I/O devices and sensors powered using solar panels or battery packs.

6
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.2.8. Landfill Ground Well Level Monitoring and Pump Counter

WSNs can be used to measure and monitor the water levels within all ground wells in
the landfill site and monitor leach ate accumulation and removal. A wireless device
and submersible pressure transmitter monitors the leach ate level. The sensor
information is wirelessly transmitted to a central data logging system to store the level
data, perform calculations, or notify personnel when a service vehicle is needed at a
specific well.

1.3. Problem Definition

In WSNs, improving quality of service is an endless process due to large number of
issues and challenges. Data contention in a sensor network is one of the very
important issues, which directly affects the quality of service of whole network.
Network congestion, alternate path routing and reliable data transport are few factors,
which can be used to control the contention.
In this thesis efforts are made to improve the quality of service in heterogeneous
wireless sensor networks by assessing and controlling the data congestion and
contention.

1.4. Quality of Service (QoS)

While a lot of research has been done on some important aspects of WSNs such as
architecture & protocol designing, energy conservation & locating, congestion control
to improve Quality of Service (QoS) in WSNs is still a largely unexplored research
field. This is mainly because WSNs are very different from traditional networks. So
far, it is not entirely clear how to properly describe the services of WSNs, much less
to develop approaches for QoS support. QoS requirements, in traditional data
networks, mainly result from the rising popularity of end-to-end bandwidth-hungry
multimedia applications. Different multimedia applications have different QoS
requirements expressed in terms of end-to-end QoS parameters. The network is
thereby required to provide better services than original best effort service, such as
guaranteed services (hard QoS) and differentiated services (soft QoS), for end-to-end
users/applications. The researchers in the literature have pursued end-to-end QoS
support using a large number of mechanisms and algorithms in different protocol
layers while maximizing bandwidth utilization. At the same time, different types of

7
 Chapter 1. Introduction

networks may impose specific constraints on the QoS support due to their particular
characteristics.

1.5. Architecture of QoS in WSNs

QoS requirements generated by the applications of WSNs may be very different and
traditional end-to-end QoS parameters may not be sufficient to describe them. As a
result, some new QoS parameters are desired for the measurement of the delivery of
the sensor data in an efficient and effective way. Further, by measuring these
parameters, network designers are also able to investigate which QoS architecture or
mechanism can be exploited to provide QoS support for the applications.

Figure 1.2 Architecture of QoS in WSNs

First, an end system uses a traffic specification procedure to specify the source traffic
characteristics and desired QoS. Then, the network employs QoS routing to find
path(s) between source and destination(s) that have sufficient resources to support the
requested QoS. At each network node, call admission control decides whether a
connection request should be accepted or rejected, based on the requested QoS, the
wired link status, and/or the statistics of wireless channels. For base stations, wireless
channel characterization is needed to specify the statistical QoS measure of a wireless
channel, e.g., a data rate, delay bound, and delay-bound violation probability triplet;
this information is used by call admission control. If a connection request is accepted,
resource reservation at each network node allots resources such as wireless channels,
bandwidth, and buffers that are required to satisfy the QoS guarantees. During the
connection lifetime, packet scheduling at each network node schedules packets to be

8
 Chapter 1. Introduction

transmitted according to the QoS requirements of the connections. As shown in

Figure 1.2, in a network node, QoS routing, call admission control, resource
allocation, and wireless channel characterization, are functions on the control plane,
i.e., performed to set up connections; packet scheduling is a function on the data
plane, i.e., performed to transmit packets.

1.6. Factors Affecting to Quality of Service

Following are some factors, which directly or indirectly affect the QoS of WSNs.

1.6.1. Network Congestion and Contention

In WSNs, data transmission is opportunistic. Nodes within the event radius transmit
data whenever they get channel access. As a consequence, multiple nodes within the
event radius contend for the channel simultaneously resulting huge collision. Packet
loss due to collision is one of the major reasons for congestion in sensor network.
Also, data transmission in WSNs under single or multiple sink scenarios follows
many-to-one generalization. As a result, irrespective of number of events and their
location nodes near to the sink or in the intersection of multiple routes are responsible
for relaying more data than others. The situation is depicted in Figure 1.3 (nodes near
to sink have higher source count value than nodes at a distant). Nodes having higher
source count value indicate that they are responsible for forwarding more data than
the nodes having lower source count value.

Figure 1.3. Network Congestion Hierarchy

To avoid congestion caused due to collision nodes having higher source count value
should get higher channel access. Also, number of transmission opportunity for a

9
 Chapter 1. Introduction

downstream node should be equal to the summation of all of its upstream nodes
transmission opportunity. Hence, irrespective of number of events and their locations
the whole network should maintain a hierarchical channel access to avoid congestion
caused due to collision.

1.6.2 Routing & Power Consumption

Our aim is to find an optimal path to the gateway in terms of energy consumption and
error rate while meeting the end-to-end delay requirements. End-to-end delay
requirements are associated only with the real-time data. Note that, in this case we
have both real-time and non-real-time traffic coexisting in the network, which makes
the problem more complex. We not only should find paths that meet the requirements
for real-time traffic, but need to maximize the throughput for non-real time traffic as
well.

Figure 1.4. Battlefield Surveillance

This is because most of the critical applications such as battlefield surveillance, as
shown in Figure 1.4, have to receive for instance acoustic data regularly in order not
to miss targets. Therefore it is important to prevent the real-time traffic from
consuming the bulk of network bandwidth and leave non-real-time data starving and
thus incurring large amount of delay

1.7. Challenges
Following are the challenges for the improvement of QoS in WSNs.

10
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.7.1. Bandwidth constraint

A typical issue for general wireless networks is securing the bandwidth needed for
achieving the required QoS [6]. Bandwidth limitation is a serious issue for WSNs.
Traffic in WSNs can be burst with a mixture of real-time and non-real-time traffic.
Dedicating the available bandwidth solely to QoS traffic will not be acceptable. A
trade-off in image/video quality may be necessary to accommodate non-real-time
traffic. In addition, using multiple independent routes simultaneously will sometime
be needed to split the traffic and allow for meeting the QoS requirements. Setting up
independent routes for the same flow can be very complex and challenging in sensor
networks due energy constraints, limited computational resources and potential
increase in collisions among the transmission of sensors.

1.7.2. Removal of Redundancy

WSNs are characterized with high redundancy in the generated data. For
unconstrained traffic, elimination of redundant data messages is somewhat easy since
simple aggregation functions would suffice. However, conducting data aggregation
for QoS traffic is much more complex [7]. Comparison of images and video streams
is not computationally trivial and can consume significant energy resources. A
combination of system and sensor level rules would be necessary to make aggregation
of QoS data computationally feasible. Another factor of consideration is the amount
of QoS traffic at a particular moment. For low traffic, it may be more efficient to
cease data aggregation since the overhead would become dominant. Despite the
complexity of data aggregation of imaging and video data, it can be very rewarding
from a network performance point of view, given the size of the data and the
frequency of the transmission.

1.7.3. Energy and delay trade-off

Since the transmission power of radio is proportional to the distance squared or even
higher order in noisy environments or in the non-flat terrain, the use of multi-hop
routing is almost a standard in WSNs. Although the increase in the number of hops
dramatically reduces the energy consumed for data collection, the accumulative
packet delay magnifies. As packet queuing delay dominates its propagation delay, the
increase in the number of hops can not only slow down packet delivery but also
complicate the analysis and the handling of delay-constrained traffic [15]. Therefore,

11
 Chapter 1. Introduction

it is expected that QoS routing of sensor data would have to sacrifice energy
efficiency to meet delivery requirements. In addition, redundant routing of data may
be unavoidable to cope with the typical high error rate in wireless communication,
further complicating the trade-off between energy consumption and delay of packet
delivery.

1.7.4. Buffer size limitation

Sensor nodes are usually constrained in processing and storage capabilities. Multi-hop
routing relies on intermediate relaying nodes for storing incoming packets for
forwarding to the next hop. While a small buffer size can conceivably suffice,
buffering of multiple packets has some advantages in WSNs. First, the transition of
the radio circuitry between transmission and reception modes consumes considerable
energy [8] and thus, it is advantageous to receive many packets prior to forwarding
them. In addition, data aggregation and fusion involves multiple packets. Multi-hop
routing of QoS data would typically require long sessions and buffering of even larger
data, especially when the delay jitter is of interest. The buffer size limitation will
increase the delay variation that packets incur while traveling on different routes and
even on the same route. Such an issue will complicate medium access scheduling and
make it difficult to meet QoS requirements.

1.7.5. Support of multiple traffic types

Inclusion of heterogeneous set of sensors raises multiple technical issues related to
data routing. For instance, some applications might require a diverse mixture of
sensors for monitoring temperature, pressure and humidity of the surrounding
environment, detecting motion via acoustic signatures and capturing the image or
video tracking of moving objects. These special sensors are either deployed
independently or the functionality can be included on the normal sensors to be used
on demand [18]. Readings generated from these sensors can be at different rates,
subject to diverse quality of service constraints and following multiple data delivery
models, as explained earlier. Therefore, such a heterogeneous environment makes
data routing more challenging.

12
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.7.6. Resource Constraints

Sensor nodes are usually low-cost, low power; small devices that are equipped with
only limited data processing capability, transmission rate, battery energy, and
memory. Due to the limitation on transmission power, the available bandwidth and
the radio range of the wireless channel are often limited. In particular, energy
conservation is critically important for extending the lifetime of the network, because
it is often infeasible or undesirable to recharge or replace the batteries attached to
sensor nodes once they are deployed. Actuator nodes typically have stronger
computation and communication capabilities and more energy budget relative to
sensors. Resource constraints apply to both sensors and actuators, notwithstanding. In
the presence of resource constraints, the network QoS may suffer from the
unavailability of computing and/or communication resources. For instance, a number
of nodes that want to transmit messages over the same WSNs have to compete for the
limited bandwidth that the network is able to provide. As a consequence, some data
transmissions will possibly experience large delays, resulting in low level of QoS.
Due to the limited memory size, data packets may be dropped before the nodes
successfully send them to the destination. Therefore, it is of critical importance to use
the available resources in WSNs in a very efficient way.

1.7.7. Platform Heterogeneity

Sensors and actuators do not share the same level of resource constraints. Possibly
designed using different technologies and with different goals, they are different from
each other in many aspects such as computing/communication capabilities,
functionality, and number. In a large-scale system of systems, the hardware and
networking technologies used in the underlying WSNs may differ from one
subsystem to another [10]. This is true because of the lack of relevant standards
dedicated to WSNs and hence commercially available products often have disparate
features. This platform heterogeneity makes it very difficult to make full use of the
resources available in the integrated system. Consequently, resource efficiency cannot
be maximized in many situations. In addition, the platform heterogeneity also makes
it challenging to achieve real-time and reliable communication between different
nodes.

13
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.7.8. Dynamic Network Topology

Unlike WSNs where (sensor) nodes are typically stationary, the actuators in WSNs
may be mobile. In fact, node mobility is an intrinsic nature of many applications such
as, intelligent transportation, assisted living, urban warfare, planetary exploration, and
animal control. During runtime, new sensor/actuator nodes may be added; the state of
a node is possibly changed to from sleeping mode by the employed power
management mechanism; some nodes may even die due to exhausted battery energy.
All of these factors may potentially cause the network topologies of WSNs to change
dynamically. Dealing with the inherent dynamics of WSNs requires QoS
mechanisms to work in dynamic and even unpredictable environments. In this
context, QoS adaptation becomes necessary; that is, WSNs must be adaptive and
flexible at runtime with respect to changes in available resources. For example, when
an intermediate node dies, the network should still be able to guarantee real-time and
reliable communication by exploiting appropriate protocols and algorithms.

1.7.9. Mixed Traffic

Diverse applications may need to share the same WSNs, inducing both periodic and
non-periodic data. This feature will become increasingly evident as the scale of WSNs
grows. Some sensors may be used to create the measurements of certain physical
variables in a periodic manner for the purpose of monitoring and/or control.
Meanwhile, some others may be deployed to detect critical events. For instance, in a
smart home, some sensors are used to sense the temperature and lighting, while some
others are responsible for reporting events like the entering or leaving of a person.
Furthermore, unlike sensors for different kinds of physical variables, e.g.,
temperature, humidity, location, and speed, generate traffic flows with different
characteristics (e.g. message size and sampling rate). This feature of WSNs
necessitates the support of service differentiation in QoS management.

1.7.10. Routing Protocols

Routing in sensor networks is also very challenging due to several characteristics that
distinguish them from contemporary communication and wireless ad hoc networks
[25][27]. First of all, it is not possible to build a global addressing scheme for the
deployment of sheer number of sensor nodes. Therefore, classical IP-based protocols
cannot be applied to sensor networks. Second, contrary to typical communication

14
 Chapter 1. Introduction

networks; almost all applications of sensor networks require the flow of sensed data
from multiple regions (sources) to a particular sink. Third, generated data traffic has
significant redundancy in it since multiple sensors may generate same data within the
vicinity of a phenomenon.

Figure1.5. Routing in a Network

Such redundancy needs to be exploited by the routing protocols to improve energy

and bandwidth utilization. Fourth, sensor nodes are tightly constrained in terms of
transmission power, on-board energy, processing capacity and storage thus requiring
careful resource management. Due to such differences, many new algorithms have
been proposed for the problem of routing data in sensor networks. These routing
mechanisms have considered the characteristics of sensor nodes along with the
application and architecture requirements. Almost all of the routing protocols can be
classified as data-centric, hierarchical or location based although, there are few
distinct ones based on network flow or QoS awareness. Data-centric protocols are
query-based and depend on the naming of desired data, which helps in eliminating
many redundant transmissions. Hierarchical protocols aim at clustering the nodes so
that cluster heads can do some aggregation and reduction of data in order to save
energy. Location based protocols utilize the position information to relay the data to
the desired regions rather than the whole network. The last category includes routing
approaches that are based on general network-flow modeling and protocols that strive
for meeting some QoS requirements along with the routing function.

15
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.8. Limitations of WSNs

WSNs have several limitations that can be enumerated as under

1.8.1. Impracticability of public key crypto systems

Asymmetric algorithms require moreenergy and higher processing requirements than
symmetric ones and this is the reason why they are not usually used. Lately, this fact
is changing because there are some investigations about this class of algorithms and
its improvement concerning energy consumption. Nowadays new algorithm that have
more adequate properties for WSNs are appearing and they might be used for this
kind of sensor networks.

1.8.2. Vulnerability of nodes to physical captures

This is an inevitable limitation. The fact that the nodes are deployed in open spaces
has the vulnerability of being captured by an attacker.

1.8.3. Limited memory resources

This feature is due to the fact that nodes are small and have reduced battery power.
The smallest possible batteries are selected by creating a tradeoff between battery size
and total energy available.

1.8.4. Limited bandwidth and transmission power

The wireless sensors have a limitedbandwidth and the transmission power is
constrained, due to the same reasons that limit memory resources: their small size and
the reduced battery power.

1.8.5. Over resilience on base station exposes vulnerabilities

There exist some protocols that trust the base station and this exposes the network to
vulnerability. Normally the base station is not tamper resistant because this would be
more expensive.

1.8.6. Computational energy consumption

For all networks, it is interesting to have very low energy consumption although this
is not always possible.

16
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.8.7. Lack of a priori knowledge of post-deployment configuration

Currently there are some studies that take into account the knowledge of pre-
deployment, although in certain cases it is impossible to know the post-deployment
configuration once the sensor nodes have been deployed.

1.9. Work Carried Out

A three-layered System (3 L-S) is developed to improve the quality of service (QoS).
For all these three layers, few protocols such as A Hop by Hop Congestion Control
Protocol (HHCC), A Reliable and Energy Efficient Transport Protocol (REETP) and
Changing Routing Congestion Control Protocol (CRCP) are designed to achieve the
motive of improvement of QoS of WSNs.
In HHCC, each node calculates its node rank based on the parameters buffer Size, hop
count, channel busy ratio and MAC overhead. When the node rank crosses a threshold
value T, the sensor node will set a congestion bit in every packet it forwards. If the
congestion bit is set, the downstream node calculates the Rate Adjustment Feedback
based on the rank and propagates this value upstream towards the source nodes. The
source nodes will adjust their transmission rates dynamically based on this feedback.
A reliable and energy efficient transport protocol (REETP), mainly focuses on the
reliability and energy efficiency. This protocol consists of an Efficient Node Selection
Algorithm to determine a set of efficient nodes called E-Nodes, which form a near
optimal coverage set with largest area and highest residual energy level. The key idea
of REETP is to transfer encoded packets using LT codes from the source to the sink
block by block and each block is forwarded to an E-node. After receiving encoded
packets, the E-node tries to reconstruct the original data packets and it encodes the
original data packets again and relays them to the next E-node until it reaches the
sink.
Congestion avoidance in WSNs is a critical issue; it will not only affect transmission
reliability, and will waste valuable energy resources. In order to reduce the wireless
sensor network routing instability, Changing Routing Congestion Control Protocol for
wireless sensor networks (CRCP). In this work, a timely potential congestion
detection technique based on cognition detection technology is developed. When the
congestion happens unavoidably, CRCP is presented to reallocate traffic with
changing route protocol to mitigate congestion and avoid conflict, which will enhance
data transmission reliability of Cluster head. Congestion data local storage strategy is

17
 Chapter 1. Introduction

effectively avoids data loss during the congestion period and guarantees the reliability
of data transmission. This protocol also provides a network load balancing, postpones
network system lifetime and effectively prolongs the life cycle of the clusters.

1.10. Organization of Thesis

This thesis presents an approach for improving quality of service in WSNs using
various protocols/algorithms. Introducing congestion control, reliable data transfer
and changing routing schemes overcome the inherent latency of the approach. The
rest of this thesis is organized as follows.
Chapter 2 discusses literature survey in the area of QoS in WSNs. Starting from
conceptual views of various researchers of this field, this chapter covers all about the
related literature from various conference proceedings, books and journal of repute.
Chapter 3 presents the basic middleware architecture of WSNs. This chapter offers
the required concepts of programming support, various topologies and deployment
methodologies and design strategy and operations of WSNs software. Finally, the
overall system model, which is a three-layered prototype, is described with proper
working stages. Chapter 4 presents one of the proposed protocols A Hop-by-Hop
Congestion Control Protocol to mitigate Contention in WSNs. The chapter starts from
basic introduction of the protocol. In the next sections, protocol architecture and its
working is explained using its mathematical proof and various flow charts. In last the
results, which are in the form of simulation waveforms, are compares with a well-
known protocol to show the out comings of this work. In Chapter 5, A Reliable and
Energy Efficient Transport Protocol for WSNs is formulated. With basic introduction
this chapter provides all about the protocol. In various sections working of the
protocol using different algorithm and concepts is explained. Simulation results with
validation are presented in last. Chapter 6 explains the Changing Routing to Control
Congestion Protocol. In this chapter the system model of the protocol is explained
using its algorithm. This chapter explains how the route of traffic will change when
the congestion occurs. Validated simulation results are shown in last of this chapter.
Chapter 7 concludes the whole work with a discussion on new and appealing future
research directions.

18
 Chapter 1. Introduction

1.11. Summary
In this chapter, an introduction to WSNs, limitations, applications and challenges of
this filed are presented. Basic information of thesis like organization of thesis and
work carried out is also explained. In the next chapter we will go through the
literature survey our fields.

19