2008 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering

Energy Model for H2S Monitoring Wireless Sensor

Network
Chao Xiaojuan, Waltenegus Dargie and Lin Guan

Abstract— Several applications have been proposed for Wire- the response of a bridge to an ambient excitation (heavy wind
less sensor networks. These include habitat monitoring, structural or passing vehicles) or a forced shake (using shakers or impact
health monitoring, pipeline (gas, water, and oil) monitoring, hammers).
precision agriculture, active volcano monitoring, and many more.
To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposals, researchers The work of Xu et al. and Chintalapudi et al. include the
have developed prototypes and deployed them into real-world Wisden platform employing Mica sensor nodes and 16-bit
environments. Even though each prototype was developed for a vibration cards. The sensor network itself was established and
specific sensing task, interestingly most of the networks share tested with 25 sensor nodes on three floors of a medium-sized
several characteristics in common. Some of these are: The need office building and on a seismic test structure for conducting
for time synchronisation, high sampling rate of short duration,
multi-hop routing, periodical sampling and sleeping, and medium experiments. Kim et al. deployed 64 Mica sensor nodes on the
access control. Whereas there are a plethora of existing and San Francisco Golden Gate bridge to study the reaction of the
proposed protocols to address these issues, each prototype chooses bridge to strong wind and earthquake.
to address the issues in a proprietary manner. The lack of Likewise, Werner-Allan et al. [25] propose wireless sensor
reuse practice poses a generalisation problem. In this paper we networks for active volcano monitoring. They deploy a linear
motivate toxic gas detection during oil exploration and refinery
and demonstrate how existing or proposed protocols can be
network of 16 sensor nodes on Volcn Tungurahua, in central
employed to establish a fully functional network. Moreover, we Ecuador to monitor seismic and infrasonic signals resulting
provide a comprehensive energy model to evaluate the feasibility from an active volcano. Each sensor node was equipped with
of employing wireless sensor network for the monitoring task. a microphone and a seismometer. Interestingly, the sensor
network could be able to capture 230 volcano events just
I. I NTRODUCTION over three weeks. Stoianov et al. propose the PipeNet wireless
Several applications have been proposed for wireless sensor sensor network for monitoring large diameter, bulk-water
networks in the recent past. Mainwaring et al.[16] propose transmission pipelines. The network collects hydraulic and
wireless sensor networks for habitat monitoring, to replace acoustic/vibration data at high-sampling rate.
human presence during a scientific observation of the life Other areas of applications of wireless sensor networks
and breeding habit of seabird colonies. The motivation of include precision agriculture [4], [3], healthcare [24], under-
their proposal is that human presence can be a potential ground mining [17] and many more.
disturbance of behavioural patterns of some sensitive wild The above networks are optimised according to the sensing
animals. It may even seriously reduce or destroy populations tasks for which they are deployed. On the other hand, they
by increasing stress, eventually forcing the animals to shift to exhibit significant similarities in the types of sensor node
unsuitable habitat. The authors deployed several Mica sensors hardware they use, the frequency band and bandwidth of
on Great Duck Island to monitor seabirds. The sensors used are communication, the runtime environment and some aspects of
humidity, temperature, barometric pressure, and surrounding sensing, processing, and communication as well. Moreover,
light from which they determine breeding habits. they all face a challenge common to all wireless sensor net-
Xu et al.[26], Kim et al.[14] and Chintalapudi et al. [6] pro- works which comes from operating with exhaustible batteries,
pose wireless sensor networks for structural health monitoring namely, limited life time. While we studied the implementation
in which the structural integrity of bridges and buildings is details of the applications, we observed that they all have the
inspected using accelerometer sensors. In structural health mo- following concerns to address:
nitoring, inspection is usually categorzsed into local and global • Time synchronisation;
inspections. Local inspections aim to detect imperceptible • High sampling rate for a short duration;
fractures in a structure such as cracks, cavities, and inclusions • High resolution of the sampled data;
(i.e., foreign materials) in a specimen. Global inspection aims • Multi-hop communication; and thereby the need for
to discover damages in a structure large enough to influence medium access and link control; and,
the properties of the entire structure or a large section thereof. • Periodic sensing and periodic sleeping.
A local inspection requires sophisticated, expensive and bulky While this is the case, we also observed that each prototype
equipments whereas global inspection is based on analysis develops its own protocol to address all or some of the above
of the response of a structure to an external excitation. The concerns and no two prototypes display similarity in any of
proposed wireless sensor networks are suitable for global the protocols they implemented. On the other hand, there are
inspection. Consequently, the networks are tasked to monitor a myriad number of protocols and algorithms proposed by

978-0-7695-3193-9/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE 402

DOI 10.1109/CSE.2008.33
the research community, some even considerably referenced a negative impact on the ecological system. For instance, H2 S
and recommended for their energy-efficient performance. The in water may change the PH value, which would eventually
lack of protocol reuse practice is the motivation behind this result in an ecological imbalance between the microbes and
paper. Inasmuch as off-the-shelf sensors and sensor boards, aquatic species in that habitat.
processors, memory and radio as well as runtime environments Subsequently, various parties are interested in monitoring
(TinyOS) are employed to assemble the sensor nodes used H2 S release during oil exploration and refinery.
by the above applications, the research community should
also begin reusing existing or proposed in-network processing B. Existing Toxic Gas Detection System
algorithms and communication protocols to facilitate rapid
prototyping and eventually producing commercially feasible Pipeline ownership entails considerable management chal-
wireless sensor networks. We begin this task by motivating lenges because of the long length, high value, high risk and
a pipeline monitoring application, specifically monitoring the often difficult access conditions of the pipelines. A pipeline
leakage of H2 S in an oil refinery (PetroChina). We identify inspection task involves both a stationary sensing system and
existing self-organisation, medium access control and routing portable sensors carried by maintenance workers. A stationary
protocol and provide an extensive and comprehensive energy sensing system consists of sensors, power and signal cables
model to make the network fully functional. The energy model and a control station in which the sensed data are processed.
will enable us to evaluate the feasibility of wireless sensor Because of the initial installation as well as maintenance cost1 ,
networks for real-time gas, water and oil pipeline monitoring. the deployed sensing system may not adequately cover the
sensing field. As a result, each employee is required to carry
The rest of this paper is organised as follows: in section
with him a portable sensing device for safety reason.
2, we provide background as regards to gas pipeline moni-
toring; in section 3, we provide a network architecture for As a side remark, existing sensing systems consider reports
monitoring toxic gas with wireless sensor networks and define from individual sensors independently; they do not correlate
the sensing task; in section 4, we identify suitable protocols reports from spatially distributed sensors in order to determine
for establishing the network and give justification; in section the nature of a leakage report. For example, correlation of
5, we provide an energy model and evaluate the network sensed data can be helpful not only to detect and localise a
performance; finally, in section 6, we discuss our observation, leakage, but also to determine whether a leakage report made
share the experience learned, and raise open issues that merit by multiple sensors is a result of actual leakages or a diffusion
future research. on air of the gas from a single source.

II. BACKGROUND C. Gas Sensor Selection

During oil exploration and refinery processes, many types Several sensing technologies exist on the market. The
of toxic gases are produced as product or by-product. These technologies include Semiconductor, Catalytic, Infrared Photo-
include Ammonia (N H3 ), Hydrogen Sulfide (H2 S), and ionization, Fluorescent Surface acoustic wave (SAW) and
Sulfur Dioxide (SO2 ). Among which H2 S is a useful and vibrating beam, and Capacitive technologies. Amongst theses,
common by-product, but also a cause of health and corrosion electrochemical, IR, and catalytic measurements have become
problems. It is used to recover sulfur, which is commonly popular over the years. Whereas electrochemical sensors are
used for manufacturing sulfuric acid, medicine, cosmetics, appropriate for toxic gases detection, catalytic and IR sensors
fertilizers and rubber products. During oil extraction and are suitable for detecting combustible gases [1].
refinery processes, H2 S is carefully transported in pipelines So et al. [22] introduce a wireless laser spectroscopic trace-
to workshops where further processing take place. The main gas sensor node that integrates miniature quartz-enhanced
concern at this stage is the potential of leakages that can have photo-acoustic spectroscopy (QE-PAS) for detecting and quan-
a severe impact on human beings as well as the environment. tifying numerous gas species at part-per-million to part-
Leakage also mean putting a pipeline out of service for repair. per-billion (ppm-ppb). This and similar developments make
The cause of leakages can be excessive deformations caused employing wireless sensor network for toxic gas detection
by earthquakes, corrosion, wear and tear, material flaws or feasible.
even intentional damage.

A. The Sensing Aspect D. Calibration

Hydrogen sulphide is an extremely toxic, colorless, Gas detection instruments perform a relative measurement.
flammable gas that is heavier than air and soluble in water. Therefore, the accuracy of a measurement depends on the
It has a rotten egg odor, which is discernible at concentrations calibration. Scheduled calibration (every season) and pre-
well below its very low exposure limit. Exposure to low calibration are the usual practices in the field.
levels of hydrogen sulphide will cause irritation, dizziness and
1 All types of chemical sensors are exhaustible like dry cell batteries, i.e.,
headaches, while exposure to levels in excess of the prescribed
they lose their sensitivity over time. The life time of a sensor (measured in
limits will cause nervous system depression and, eventually, ppm/hours) depends on the amount of part per million it is exposed to. Most
death [19]. Besides the harm to human beings, H2 S has also existing sensors have an average life time of one year.

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E. Alarm Thresholds and Response Time
The alarm threshold depends on the occupational exposure
limits of the gas, which vary from country to country. For
example, the American Conference of Governmental Industrial
Hygienists (ACGIH) defines the Threshold Limit Values (TLV)
as an exposure limit ”to which it is believed nearly all workers
can be exposed day after day for a working lifetime without
ill effect” and the Threshold Limit Value - Ceiling (TLV-C) is
that ”the concentration that should not be exceeded during any
part of the working exposure.”. The limit values are different
based on short-term (15-minute exposure periods) or long-
term (8-hour workday) exposures. Some organizations even
recommend the limit value for exposure of a 40-hour work
week [11]. Fig. 1. 2D Poisson Distributed node deployment
The specific standard to be adopted depends on the user
of the gas detection system. The general limit for short-term
exposure is 10 part per million (ppm). Spot monitoring works well for traditional wired sensor sys-
The System’s response time is a very critical performance tems, but it may have problems in coverage and connectivity in
metric for leakage detection. It is decided by the sensors’ wireless sensor networks. In the next section, we will address
response speed and the transmission and processing time. The how to resolve these two problems.
nominal time is between 20 to 30 seconds, but most refineries
B. Coverage and Connectivity
set an upper limit of 60 seconds.
In [2], the sensing coverage is defined as how well a given
III. H2 S M ONITORING WITH WSN area can be monitored by the network, which is a significant
We spent three months of field observation at a China Petro- performance metric. Several papers [2] [20] propose models
chemical refinery to investigate the feasibility of employing for computing the number of sensors required to cover the
wireless sensor networks for pipeline monitoring. Following entire sensing field with high detection probability.
the field observation and throughout the M.Sc. thesis work of Coverage is deployment and density dependent. For toxic
the first author, we evaluated the usefulness, scope, and energy gas detection, spot monitoring is the most suitable strategy
demand of existing and proposed protocols for establishing since it is the safest and most energy effective. The sensor
and running an H2 S monitoring wireless sensor network. nodes are positioned at the conjunctions of pipelines. For a
We defined the sensing task, selected and compared the spot monitoring scenario, the whole area is not necessarily
performance of various protocols, and computed the overall covered everywhere without any ”blind spots”, but all potential
energy demand of the network for carrying out the chosen leakage sources are monitored.
sensing task. Our aim is to assess the feasibility of deploying Connectivity, on the other hand, is a fundamental aspect
such a network with existing sensors, sensor boards, pro- for our deployment scenario. To ensure the communication
cessors, radio components, and other essential off-the-shelf between source and sink nodes, at least one multi-hop path
components. between every pair of nodes should exist. The probability that
a network is connected, i.e., all nodes can communicate with
A. Deployment and Topology the sink either directly or with the support of intermediate
There are three basic sensor-positioning strategies in theory nodes, mainly depends on the density of nodes and their
for node deployment: spot, area and fence monitoring. In transmission range. If the border effect is not considered, this
spot monitoring, only a few sensors need to be deployed, but probability can be estimated by [5]:
one needs to know the exact pinpoint position of the leakage  
source, which is accurate but needs more time and knowledge P (connectivity) ∼
= 1/n 1 − e−λπro
2
(1)
of the field.
Area and fence monitoring are used to save time of finding where P (connectivity) is the probability that the network
the potential leakage pinpoints. In the former, sensors should is connected; λ is the density of the network; ro is the
be deployed in all regions where the source may spread across. threshold transmission rage; and n >> 1 is the number of
It requires a large number of sensors, and cannot thoroughly deployed nodes. The deployment scenario for our case is
avoid blind spots even at high densities. The latter constructs depicted in Figure
a maximum outer limit to guarantee that the target is in an
enclosure. It is suitable for applications like detecting and C. The Sensing Task
reporting security relevant incidents, such as a person or During oil exploration and refinery process, there are two
animal entering a prohibited area, but it is not suitable for essential concerns: the long and short term impact of toxic
gas detection in workshops with people nearby. gases release. For H2 S, the long term impact can be on

404
employees or the ecology at large. The impact of short A. Network Topology
term release is usually on employees. Hence, we define the
As far as topology is concerned, there are two essential
following sensing tasks:
types: flat and hierarchical. In flat networks, all nodes have
1) Every sensor node should periodically report the con- equal rights, no global knowledge is assumed to carry out a
centration of H2 S to a sink: This is characterised as a sensing task. Collaboration is based on local and neighbour-
normal case with a normal priority. hood knowledge. the main problem with flat networks is that
2) In case of a leakage that surpasses a threshold defined energy may not evenly be consumed as a result of which those
by the safety board of the refinery, an alarm should be nodes near to the sink will suffer earlier power depletion. In
fired off within 30 second. For this to happen, the report a hierarchical architecture, nodes self-organize into clusters
should be delivered to the base station in less than 30 with some acting as cluster heads. The cluster heads perform
seconds. This is characterised as an abnormal condition, data aggregation and fusion in order to reduce the number of
with high priority2 messages to the sink. It is energy efficient in data propagation
and scalable; but the creation and maintenance of clusters are
IV. N ETWORK M ODEL A SSUMPTIONS energy consuming and need global knowledge of the network.
In order to carry out the sensing assignment, we model the For our network, we adopt a flat topology which impose
network thus: minimum assumptions about nodes’ relationship.
1) N nodes are distributed randomly on a rectangular
B. Medium Access Control
area A of size A = a × b. without loss of generality,
we assume that a ≤ b. The node distribution can be A medium access control is essential for two reasons:
modelled as a two-dimensional Poisson distribution with Firstly, we prefer multi-hop communication rather than each
average density, λ. The probability of finding k nodes node communicating directly with the base station. Secondly,
in A is to reduce the overall network traffic, we should support in-
network processing. One example of in-network processing
k
(λA) is that during a normal routine sensing, each node sends to
P (k nodes in A) = eλA (2) the next intermediate node the concentration of H2 S it has
k!
sensed; the receiving node compares the report with report
2) The sensor nodes are deployed with spot monitoring
from its own sensors as well as with reports it received from
strategy with additional nodes for improved connectivity.
other sensor nodes; it then forward only the maximum level,
Spot monitoring can guarantee the coverage of all the
since only the maxim measured leakage report is of interest.
potential leakage. We ensure that the network density
This would avoid unnecessary packet transmission.
is not high but enough to meet both coverage and
For nodes to cooperate, an energy efficient medium access
connectivity requirements.
control protocol is required. The performance of a MAC
3) Sensor nodes in the local network are battery pow-
protocol is highly dependent on the density of the wireless
ered with uniform initial energy. The batteries are ex-
sensor network. We have considered several MAC protocols,
haustible. The nodes themselves are fixed once placed.
among which are S-MAC, T-MAC and B-MAC.
4) There is a single fixed sink situated in the field. The sink
is assumed to have sufficient power and energy. S-MAC [27] is based on a combined scheduling and con-
5) All nodes in the area communicate in a multi-hop fash- tention method. Each node sleeps periodically, during which
ion because of two reasons: firstly, sensor nodes have time the radio is shut down and a timer is running. When the
only small transmission range and may not be able to timer expires, the node wakes up to see if any other node wants
communicate directly with the sink; secondly, multiple to communicate with it. S-MAC uses the RTS/CTS handshake
short-range transmissions can save considerable energy mechanism similar to 802.11, but sets it as default settings and
as opposed to one large hop transmission. Therefore extends this scheme to avoid overhearing by forcing all the
every node in the field may act as both a data source immediate neighbours of the sender and receiver into a sleep
and a relay. state. All nodes are synchronized through a SYNC packet.
6) Each node has the same radio transmission range R, and The ratio of listen interval to the frame length is called duty
two nodes can communicate via a wireless link if their cycle, by setting low duty cycle, and together with overhearing
Euclidean distance ≤ R. avoidance and message passing, S-MAC obtains significant
7) When sensing, each sample is quantized and encoded energy savings compared with sleepless 802.11[12] variant
into 16 bits. protocols.
8) For simplification, fading and path efficiency are not However S-MAC trades off latency for energy saving,
taken into account; we do not also consider the presence because nodes cannot transmit or receive data in sleep mode. A
of obstacles in the path of propagation. modified S-MAC version[28] proposes an Adaptive Listening
technique to reduce multi-hop latency by letting the node that
2 At this stage we do not consider more complex but also more realistic overhears its neighbour’s transmissions wakes up for a short
sensing tasks as defined in Section period at the end of each transmission.

405
 In S-MAC, active period is constant for every node and strict regulation of industrial safety rules. There is a modified
frame, which makes the duty cycle have to be enlarged for version of S-MAC to deal with this issue based on adaptive
even only a short period of peak traffic load. listening. this latter version lets a node which overhears its
T-MAC [23] proposes an idea that the nodes go back neighbour’s transmissions (ideally only RTS or CTS) wake
to sleep when no traffic has happened for a certain time up for a short time at the end of the transmission. In this
(=timeout), but it also incurs the early sleeping problem that way, if the node is the next-hop node, its neighbour is able
limits the maximum throughput. to immediately forward data to it instead of waiting for the
B-MAC [18] use adaptive Low Power Listening (= preamble next scheduled listen time. On the other hand, if there is no
sampling) to reduce duty cycle and provide flexible interface activity during the adaptive listening period, nodes will decide
for reconfiguration and performance optimization. We choose to go back to sleep again. S-MAC with adaptive meets well
S-MAC as our MAC layer algorithm for five reasons: the requirements of our sensing task.
1) It is significantly energy efficient comparing to other Secondly, neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-
MAC protocols without sleeping. synchronize their sleep schedules. In a large network, all nodes
2) With configurable duty-cycle, S-MAC is more adaptable may not be able to follow the same schedule. This will lead
for different scenarios nodes on the border to respond to more than one schedule
3) Most other energy-saving MAC protocols originate from and spend less sleeping time and consume more energy than
S-MAC’s periodical sleep and wakeup scheme. Using S- others. Moreover, nodes following multiple schedules may
MAC makes our re-search more flexible if we want to cause undesirable delay in data transmission. To overcome
support other similar MAC protocols later. this drawback, S-MAC employs the Global Schedule Algo-
4) Its synchronization algorithm also provides self- rithm [15] by which a single global schedule is established
configure functionality, which could achieve self- throughout the network.
organization without special algorithms. Third, S-MAC uses message passing to reduce contention
5) Though latency is not our concern currently, it is a latency. Message passing allows a long message to be divided
critical issue for the whole system. With the Adaptive into several smaller packets and transmitted continuously when
Listening algorithm in S-MAC, our implementation can the node obtains a channel. This technique increases the sleep
achieve short latency and energy efficiency at the same time, but leads to fairness problems.
time. We found out that this specific characteristic was not suit-
C. Routing Protocol able for our sensing task, particularly in case of the detection
of a leakage above the threshold of safety. Therefore, our
A routing protocol deals with path selection and mainte- energy model does not consider message passing.
nance for data transmission in a network. In sensor networks,
energy efficiency and data aggregation have to be in mind
when choosing a routing protocol. B. Routing Layer Design
Popular routing protocols include SPIN [10], Directed Dif-
fusion [13], LEACH [9] and BCDCP [21]. Directed Diffusion family [8] permits applications to define
Directed Diffusion [13] is a data-centric routing protocol in-network processing policy and routing metrics. Moreover,
based on set up and report phases. In the set up phase, it is adaptable to changes in data sources, network topology
the sink floods interests to the whole network. During the and the sink’s quality of service priorities. The protocol
propagation of interest, every hop establishes the gradients implementation can be (1) two-phase pull diffusion, (2) one-
to its direct neighbour. The source whose data matches the phase push diffusion, or (3) one-phase pull diffusion.
interest will send exploratory data through multiple paths to 1) Two-phase Pull diffusion: In this implementation, there
the sink, and the sink would select and reinforce some of the are two phases. In the first phase, the sink distributes interests
paths. The criteria for reinforcing a path may be low latency in terms of named data in attribute-value pairs. The interest
or energy efficiency. Once efficient paths are selected, the data is flooded in the network. Each sensor node that receives an
will be sent from the source to the sink along the reinforced interest packet maintains a gradients table to track where this
paths. Directed Diffusion accommodates application specific, interest comes from. With the gradients, the node could select
in-network data aggregation algorithms. proper node as next-hop to forward the data.
After setting up a gradient, the sensor node redistributes the
V. P ROTOCOLS I MPLEMENTATION interest packet by broadcasting. Nodes that have data matched
A. MAC Layer Design interest will publish and forward the required data along all
With the design goal of energy conservation and self- existing gradients till the sink. (This is called an exploratory
configuration, S-MAC uses three novel techniques to achieve data.)
dynamic medium access control. In the second phase, the sink uses positive or negative
Firstly, nodes periodically sleep and wake up, with low duty reinforcement messages to select one or multiple paths to the
cycle to save energy and avoid collision. However, network nodes that contribute exploratory data. And subsequent data
latency caused by periodical sleeping may not comply with the from source will be transmitted through the reinforced path(s).

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 Definition Periodical report Leakage report Basic Parameter DefaultValue
interest: normal interest: abnormal Control message RTS/CTS/ACK 10bytes
Interest type = normal type = abnormal SYNC message 9 bytes
Example H2 S con. < 10ppm H2 S con. ≥ 10ppm Interest message 96bytes
interval = 1000s interval = 10s Data message 136 bytes
expiry = 02:20:40 expiry = 02:20:35 Interest propagation frequency 300 seconds
Gradient minimum energy Low-latency, Normal event report interval 300 seconds
Data type = normal abnormal Abnormal event report interval 10 seconds
Example (normal priority) (high priority Abnormal event report period 60 seconds
instance = 5ppm instance = 50ppm Abnormal event occurrence ratio 1%
id = 002 id = 001 Duty cycle 10%
timestamp = 01:30:40 timestamp = 01:20:40 Bandwidth 2kbps
TABLE I Network density λ
Minimum hop counts This depends on the
D EFINITION OF INTEREST, GRADIENT, AND DATA MESSAGE
sensing field and
the network model.
The average number of
hops for our case is 3
S-MAC Frame length Message size, duty cycle
The problem with the two-phase pull suffers from interest and bandwidth
Adaptation time Frame length dependent
flooding and exploratory broadcast traffics, and reinforcement Max retry times 5
message is also an energy consumption process. Frequency of neighbour 50
Discovery
Two variations of Two-phase pull diffusion are brought Synchronization period 20
up for performance improvement: , which is suitable for Data rate 2kbps
few senders and many receivers scenario and One-phase pull Nominal transmission 40m
diffusion, which is suitable for many senders, few receivers Range
Sensing field 7000m2 (70m × 100m)
scenario. Transmission power 31.2mW
2) One-phase push Diffusion: With this implementation, Receive/idle power 22.2mW
Radio@sleep status 3μ W
instead of actively sending interest, a sink keeps the interest
information locally. Source nodes play active roles in commu- TABLE II
nication. Exploratory data is sent through the network without D EFINITION OF PARAMETERS
gradients created according to a certain interest. This saves
the cost of interest dissemination in two-phase pull. However
One-phase push diffusion is not suitable for applications where
C. Analysis of Energy Budget
many sources continuously generate data, as all the data may
not be equally relevant to the sink, in fact some of them could The energy budget of a fully functional network depends on
entirely be irrelevant. many parameters. It accounts for the medium access control
and routing; the interest dissemination, the rate at which events
3) One-Phase Pull Diffusion: One-phase pull is a
are propagated from any source in the network to the sink,
subscriber-based system. The subscribers send interest mes-
the rate at which abnormal events are detected, the duty-cycle
sages into the network to establish gradients. Unlike two-phase
of the medium access control, the density of the network,
pull, when an interest arrives at a source, it does not mark
the transceiver’s transmission distance, the efficiency of the
its first data message as exploratory, but instead sends data
transceiver, the data rate, the resolution of the ADC, time
only on the preferred gradient, the lowest latency neighbour.
synchronisation 3 , and the size of the data payload, among
Thus One-phase pull does not require reinforcement messages,
other things. Table
and the lowest latency path is implicitly reinforced. One-phase
For every payload packet exchange between a sender and
pull takes the assumption of the existence of a symmetric
a receiver, it is possible to compute the energy utilisation for
communication link between nodes.
the following modes:
For our scenario, the possibility that many leakages happen
1) Transmission: 1RT S + 1CT S + 1ACK + 1DAT A4
at the same time is very low; this implies that abnormal interest
2) Receive: nRT S + nCT S 5 +1ACK + 1DAT A
dissemination is infrequent. We can model this scenario as
3) Idle: At least 1DIF S + 3SIF S + ia 6
few sender and one sink, which is applicable to two-phase-
4) Synchronization:Because in S-MAC for every certain
pull. Whereas in the normal case, every node should report
rounds, the nodes should exchange SYNC packets with
its monitoring data periodically, which is a typical scenario of
many senders and one sink suitable for one-phase pull. The 3 S-MAC requires time synchronisation for nodes to exchange sleeping
latter scenario dominates the network’s lifetime. Additionally, schedule with their neighbours.
4 Here we take a one time transmission only; a more complex calculation
compared to two-phase pull diffusion, there is no exchange
depends on maximum number of retry attempt and failure model.
of overhead information like reinforce messages; and routing 5 Where n represents the neighbors of the sender and the receiver.
tables require only one entry per active interest in one-phase- 6 Where i is the average idle time. We take 1/2 frame based on probability
a
pull diffusion. theory. A more detail analysis falls out of the scope of this paper.

407
 40000 4.5
Total Energy Total Energy
Sync Energy Sync Energy
Normal Event Energy 4.4 Normal Event Energy
35000 Abnormal Event Energy Abnormal Event Energy

Logarithmic function of Energy Consumption(J)

4.3
30000
4.2
Energy Consumption(J)

25000
4.1

20000 4

3.9
15000

3.8
10000
3.7

5000
3.6

0 3.5
10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 2 4 6 8
Node Density Abnormal Rate(percent)

Fig. 2. The Energy demand of the network as a function of density Fig. 3. The Energy demans of the network as a function of the frequency
of abnormal leakage detection

one’s neighbors, this depends on the node density of the 4000

Normal Event Energy
Abnormal Event Energy
network and some S-MAC synchronization settings.
3500
5) Sleep: For every frame, the rest is sleeping time.
Some parameters influence the energy utilisation of the 3000
Energy Consumption Every Hour(J)

network more strongly than others. To demonstrate the degree

2500
of their influence, we have defined them as variables. These
are duty cycle, frequency of schedule synchronisation, network
2000
density, the frequency of normal and abnormal interest propa-
gation, and the average number of hops for a message to reach 1500

the sink. More precisely, schedule synchronisation consists of

1000
two components:
• Frequency of synchronisation 500
• Frequency of finding new neighbours
0
With a one-phase-pull Directed Diffusion routing protocol, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Interval(Hour)
interest dissemination and data propagation consists of:
• The frequency of interest propagation; Fig. 4. The energy demand of the network as a function of the frequency
• The normal event propagation interval; and, of interval propagation in the network
• The abnormal event occurrence ratio.
We computed the energy utilisation of a fully functional
wireless sensor network that reflects the influence of the converter to produce a high resolution senor data. In reality,
parameters above. The result is displayed in figure the ADC consumes significant power, too. In the future, we
will accommodate this fact to assess the feasibility of using
VI. D ISCUSSION existing off-the-shelf hardware in wireless sensor networks.
As the density of the network increases (Figure
Synchronisation claims the most significant part of the R EFERENCES
energy budget of the sensor network. As can be seen in Figure
In our analysis, we employed the Bianchi Model[7] for [1] L. Boettern. How Oxygen, Electrochemical Toxic, and Metal Oxide
computing the energy cost of time synchronisation. Semiconductor Sensors Work, 2000.
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