What are sensor networks

• A sensor network is a collection of some (sometimes even hundreds &

thousands) smart sensor nodes which collaborate among themselves to form
a sensing network.

• Smart sensors are wireless computing devices that sense information in

many variety of environments to provide a multidimensional view of the
environment.

ex: some sensors can sense light, some can sense temperature
simultaneously.

• The main task of a sensor network can be divide into three categories.
Sensing, processing and acting.

• After sensing the environment based on the query provided by the user, a
sensor node can process the sensed data, may even sometimes aggregate it
with other nodes data and send it to the base station.

Examples of sensor networks

• Vigilant surveillances like security in a shopping mall, an air passengers

behavior.

• Predetermining Environmental hazards, providing precision agriculture.

• Monitoring of computer server rooms.

Monitoring of manufacturing plants

Routing in sensor networks

• one basic operation of sensor networks is to gather the sensed data and
transmit it to the base station, for further processing or as result to a given
query.

• The general scenario in these networks is, during data gathering the
intermediate nodes can aggregate the data in order to avoid redundant
transfers.

• The order in which the data or the aggregated data is transmitted from the
source node to the base station is the problem of routing.
 • Why can’t we apply the standard routing algorithms?

• Tree based routing is used when there are few number of nodes and
hierarchical routing is used for large number of nodes.

• All the routing protocols should respect the energy constraints of the nodes.

• All the routing algorithms mentioned below consider sensor nodes to be

static, homogeneous and energy constrained.

• Almost all the algorithms mentioned below will try to maximize the lifetime of
the sensor network.

• The lifetime of the network can be described as the time till data can be
transferred, before a sensor node gets completely drained of its energy.

• The effective utilization of energy is the typical measure of performance in

sensor networks.

Sensor network topology with routing tree overlays

• The most common way of routing in a sensor networks is routing trees (multi
hop routing).

• A routing tree is a collection of sensor nodes with the base station as the root
of the tree.

• Sensor A is the parent for sensors

B and C.

. Sensor nodes transmit all there

results to there parent nodes only. It

is the responsibility of the parent node

for forwarding them to the base station

. A child can keep track of several

parent nodes, and depending on

the power levels or the quality of the

communication links a child node

can change its parent node.

The Maximum Lifetime Data Aggregation Problem (MLDA)

• ” Given a collection of sensors and a base station, together with their location
and the energy of each sensor, find a data gathering schedule, where sensors
are permitted to aggregate incoming data packets, with maximum lifetime”.

• Routing structures such as routing trees is well suited when there are only a
few number of nodes in the network.

• Managing the routing trees in such case will become infeasible and the
overlaps in the routing trees can not be effectively utilized.

• A data gathering schedule is a way the data packets are collected from all
the sensors and routed to the base station with maximum lifetime.

• The main assumption of this algorithm is that the location of the sensors,
base station and energy values of the sensor nodes are known priori.

• In this model the lifetime of the system is intrinsically connected to the data
gathering schedule.

• During each round a sensor will collect its own, neighbor’s data and possibly
aggregate it and send it to the base station.
• If there is T such rounds and ‘f ‘be the total number of packets a sensor node
i transmits to sensor node j .By respecting the energy constraints at each
node, the data transferring schedule can be viewed as flow network G (V,E).

• Schedule S induces a flow network G = ( V, E).

• By maintaining the flow conservation principle and the energy constraints of

each sensor, an optimal admissible flow network is constructed i.e. a directed
graph G having all the sensors as nodes and the base station as the root.

• Each directed tree rooted at the base station is considered as an aggregate

tree, and schedule is a collection of such trees.

• The number of rounds the aggregation tree is used to transmit data is

denoted by f and associating it with each one of the edges.

• The depth of a schedule is defined as max {depth (v): v belongs to V}.

• An iterative algorithm GETTREE is used to get an aggregation tree A with life

time f from the admissible flow network. The running time of the below
described algorithm is of polynomial time in the number of sensors.
max-min zPmin

• max-min zPmin is an approximation algorithm for online power aware

routing.

• The goal of this algorithm is similar to that of the previous algorithm that we
discussed, to maximize the lifetime of the network.

• Online routing refers to that there is no fixed schedule for routing the
messages.

• In this algorithm the network is represented as a weighted graph G (V, E).

The nodes in the network are the vertices of the graph with weights
corresponding to there power levels. Edges correspond to the communication
link between nodes and the edge weight as the cost of sending data between
them.
 • The max-min zPmin is defined as routing the data along a path with
maximal minimal fraction of the remaining power in a sensor node after the
data is transmitted i.e. max-min path and a path with minimal power
consumption Pmin, with zPmin being the relaxed power consumption for
sending the data.

• The algorithm runs the Dijkstra algorithm for at most | E | times to find the
shortest path. The running time of this algorithm is O (|E|. (|E| + |V| log |V|)).

Hierarchical routing

• All the above discussed algorithms tried to maximize the lifetime of the
system by finding a routing path that uses less energy.

• This type of routing is known as multi hop routing or static clustering which
has very serious limitations when the number of nodes in the network
becomes very large.

• Static or multi hop routing protocols require the knowledge of the energy
levels of the sensor nodes which may be difficult to obtain in large networks.
One method of obtaining such information is through broadcasting. But ?

• In large network networks transmitting data through intermediate nodes may

sometimes consume more than routing directly to the base station. So large
networks are divided into zones are clusters.

Zone based max-min zPmin

• Zone based routing is a hierarchical approach to the max-min zPmin.

• The algorithm groups the nodes in the network structurally into geographical
zones that can overlap, and organizes zones hierarchically to control routing
across zones.

• The algorithm is divided into three main parts, first how the nodes in a zone
collaborate to estimate the energy level of the zone. Second, how data is
routed within a zone and third, how data is routed across zones.

• The energy estimation of the zones is done relative to the direction of data
transmission.

• The zones are assumed to be squares with their neighbors being in north,
east, west, and south directions.

• There is a controller node in each zone which estimates the energy level of
the zone i.e. estimating the number of messages that can flow through the
zone. The controller poles each node in the zone for its energy level and then
runs the max-min zPmin algorithm. Then it simulates sending proportionate
amount of data units, and repeats it until a node on the path gets saturated.
• After estimating the power level of each zone with respect to the directions of
the other zones, the next thing is estimating a global path to route the data.

• The zones are represented as a K+1 graph, where k vertices correspond to

each data direction through the zone. The zone label vertex is connected to
all the data direction vertices and the data direction vertices are connected
to neighboring zone vertices if data can be transmitted in that way.

• The edges in this zone graph do not have weights, and a global route for
sending data can be found as the max-min path in the zone graph.

• The path that is selected should be the path that goes through zones with
maximum power levels i.e. a slight modification to the max-min zPmin
algorithm.
 • After a global path through the zones is found the next task is to find routes
within a zone.

• For each node in the overlap region, the number of paths that can be locally
routed through each node is computed during the energy level estimation.

• Finally only those nodes that have maximum data weight is selected to
maximize the global flow between zones i.e. choosing nodes which can be
useful in both local and global routing.

The algorithm to find global path to route the data.