Seventh International Conference on Networking

Simulation of Blind Flooding over Wireless Sensor Networks Based on a Realistic Battery Model
Marco Aur lio Spohn e Federal University of Campina Grande Computing and Systems Department Campina Grande, PB, Brazil maspohn@dsc.ufcg.edu.br P. S. Sausen, Fabiano Salvadori and Mauricio Campos Universidade Regional do Noroeste do Estado do RS - UNIJU I Technology Departament Iju RS Brazil {sausen,f.salvadori,campos}@unijui.edu.br Abstract
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a power constrained system, because nodes run on limited power batteries. When a node switches between modes (i.e., transmit, receive, and sleep), there are also changes related to the transition process. Although the switching energy is considered negligible most of the time, it is strongly dependent on the technology (e.g., the radio) deployed on the nodes. Most of the time, the switching energy is neglected to simplify the simulation process. To better understand energy consumption in a WSN, it is necessary to adopt a more realistic battery model. Network simulators usually employ the linear discharge model. This model is simple, but far from reality, leading to wrong conclusions like, for example, that switching energy necessarily implies on energy consumption. Getting a more accurate measure for the energy consumption of a sensor network may lead to better estimates for the network lifetime. To better understand the impact of a more realistic battery model on the simulation of a WSN, we compare the results for blind ooding using the standard battery model (i.e., linear model) to the results obtained using the Rakhmatov-Vrudhula battery model which captures the non-linear battery behavior.

1. Introduction
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) comprises a large number of small sized nodes each one having a processing unit, a radio transceiver and antenna for wireless communi-

cations, one or more sensor units (e.g., temperature, speed, acoustic, seismic), and a power unit usually with a low capacity battery. To prolong the network lifetime, dynamic power management mechanisms can provide the means for saving energy. The basic approach consists on putting nodes components to sleep whenever possible. Nodes are brought back to an active state upon the occurrence of some event, or otherwise, following some pre-dened activation schedule. In the former case, the sensor unit is kept active to react to any expected event. Therefore, usually a node is kept partially on, but the power savings from keeping most units in a sleep state pays off. When a node switches between modes (i.e., transmit, receive, and sleep), there are also changes to the power consumed by the node not only after the node is in a different mode, but also during the switching process. Although the switching energy is considered negligible most of the time, it is strongly dependent on the technology (e.g., radio) being deployed on the sensor nodes. In particular, for lowduty cycle networks like the sensor networks, the switching energy may impact the overall energy consumption. Most of the time, the switching energy is neglected to simplify the simulation process. To better understand energy consumption in a WSN, it is necessary to adopt a more realistic battery discharge model. Network simulators usually employ the linear discharge model, which is simple and far from reality, leading to wrong conclusions like, for example, that switching states always implies on battery capacity discharge. Getting a more accurate measure for the energy consumption of a WSN may lead to better estimates for the network lifetime. For example, an error of 6% on

978-0-7695-3106-9/08 $25.00 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICN.2008.100

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the energy consumption of a WSN translates into shortening the network lifetime by two months over an expectancy of three years [13]. Many protocols for wireless networks, if not all of them resort to the broadcast of control and data packets (e.g., when searching for a route to a given destination in on demand routing protocols). This work presents a comparison between the simulation of blind ooding1 over WSNs using the standard battery model (i.e., linear model) and a more realistic battery model. Even though there is no transition when performing the blind ooding of a message, we present an insight into the details of transitioning a node to a different state. This will provide the basics for planning a broadcast mechanism that takes advantage when transitioning a node to the sleeping state after the transmission of the rst copy of a broadcast message. We plan to investigate how to take advantage of the SE in a future work regarding power saving broadcasting. The rest of this Paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a short description of WSN, and Section 3 presents a brief discussion on battery models. Section 4 talks about the switching energy, and Section 5 presents the performance analysis. Section 6 concludes this work.

Sensor unit
DA converter

Processing unit

Power unit

Actuators

Communication unit

Memory

Battery

DC-DC Converter

AD converter

Sensors

CPU

Figure 1. Sensor node: basic structure Therefore, energy consumption is usually taken as a performance metric to compare different protocols. Each battery in a nodes power unit can be characterized by two values: (i) open-circuit voltage, Voc , that is the batterys voltage when the battery is totally charged with no discharge electric current; and (ii) the cut-off voltage, Vco , that is the batterys voltage when the battery is deemed discharged. A batterys capacity, C, can be expressed in three different ways [9]: (i) the theoretical capacity which is based on the amount of energy stored in the battery, and that is the maximum energy that can be consumed in practice; (ii) the standard capacity which is the energy that can be obtained under some conditions specied by the battery manufacturer; and (iii) the actual capacity is the amount of energy that the battery delivers under a given load, and is usually used as a metric to judge the battery efciency. While the actual capacity may exceed the standard capacity, it cannot exceed the theoretical capacity of the battery. In this Paper, when we mention battery capacity we are actually referring to the actual battery capacity in terms of mA-ms2 . The battery performance with regards to the discharge pattern depends on two effects [9]: (i) the capacity effect which depends on the battery actual capacity and the discharge electric current; (ii) the recovery effect due to the battery capacity recovery during idle periods, that is, periods during which the actual electric current is drastically reduced. Battery models aim at capturing the actual battery characteristics. These models can help predicting the batterys behavior under a large variety of conditions. When integrated into a network simulator, it is possible to analyze protocols under a more realistic scenario, giving a better picture of a protocols behavior in terms of energy consumption. Battery models can be classied according to their characteristics [9]: (i) analytical models; (ii) electrical circuit based models; (ii) stochastic models; and (iv) eletrochemical models. Among them, we have special attention to the analytical models with constant load and models with variable load. Some of these models can capture both the
2 Read it as mA times ms. We have adopted this notation because a sensor node usually requests an electric current of order of mA during very short periods of order of ms.

2. Wireless Sensor Networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may well contain hundreds or thousands of small autonomous elements called sensor nodes, and each sensor can feature a large variety of sensors (e.g., temperature, speed, acoustic, seismic). In many cases, nodes are randomly spread over remote areas, making it difcult to perform any maintenance to the nodes. Hence, a node remains live while it has enough battery capacity for its normal operation, and the network lifetime strongly depends on the remaining capacity of the nodes in the network. A sensor node has a few basic components (see Figure 1) [3,11] as follows: i) a processing unit which includes a microprocessor or a micro-controller; ii) a communication unit which consists of a short range radio for wireless communication; iii) a sensor unit that contains a group of sensors and actuators; iv) and a power unit, usually a battery, which acts as the power source for all nodes components.

3. Battery Models
Given that usually it is unfeasible to replace nodes batteries after the network has already been deployed, it is paramount to any WSN protocol to be energy efcient.
1 In

blind ooding every node broadcast the rst copy of any broadcast

packet.

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Radio

Discharge current - mA

capacity effect and the recovery effect. Analytical models are exible regarding their implementation, and they can be easily congured to any battery specication. The linear battery model is the simplest analytical model. This model considers the battery as a linear electric current source. This way, the equation C = C Itd allows computing the remaining battery capacity, C, where C is the initial battery capacity, and I is the constant discharge electric current for the period of time td . The remaining battery capacity is computed always when the discharge current changes its value. To analyze the impact of a more realistic battery model on the simulation of a WSN, we have adopted the Rakhmatov-Vrudhula [12] battery analytical model. In the next Section, we present a brief description of this model.

245910
Rakhmatov-Vrudhula model

245860 245810
Battery Capacity - mA-ms

Linear model

245760 245710 245660 245610 245560 245510 245460 30 20

3.1. Rakhmatov-Vrudhula Battery Model

Rakhmatov and Vrudhula [12] derived the equations for computing the lifetime of a lithium-ion battery considering both a constant and a variable load. Two parameters are used for computing the battery lifetime: (i) the parameter which is related to the battery capacity, and the parameter with regards to the non-linear battery behavior during charging and discharging periods. Equation 1 describes the impact of the discharge prole on the battery lifetime, where Ik1 is the discharge electric current during the period k 1. Function A computes the impact of the battery non-linear behavior, where L is the battery lifetime, tk is the time duration for period k and tk1 is the time duration for period k 1. More details about function A and the algorithm for computing L can be obtained from [12].
n

2 0

10
Time (ms)

12

14

16

18

20

Figure 2. Battery capacity as a function of its discharge electric current.

to the battery capacity. Note that for a battery to recover its capacity it does not imply reducing its consumption to zero, but it certainly requires a reduction on the consumption. Figure 3 shows the difference between the energy consumption for the linear model and the Rakhmatov-Vrudhula model. The linear model presents an energy consumption 50 times larger than the Rakhmatov-Vrudhula model considering the same discharge prole with a 10 s duration. This huge difference is due to the fact that the linear model cannot capture the battery capacity effect and the recovery effect. Of course the difference increases as we increase the discharge duration, because it is not linear (e.g., in the performance analysis we show that the difference is up to 400 times larger). Handy and Timmermann [6] present an algorithm for integrating the Rakhmatov-Vrudhula battery model into simulation environments for wireless mobile networks. The proposed mechanism estimate the lifetime for battery operated devices following an interactive approach without requiring the knowledge about the whole past of the battery discharge pattern. The same approach is used in this work, but instead of using the parameters for a Lithium-Ion battery we have used = 245910 and = 4034 which were estimated based on an alkaline battery [2] usually employed in WSN devices.

=
k=1

2Ik1 A(L, tk , tk1 , )

(1)

The parameters for computing the batterys lifetime, L, are the following ones: (i) the values for the discharge electric current, SI = {I0 , I1 , . . . , In }; (ii) the respective time intervals, St = {t0 , t1 , . . . , tn }; and (iii) the and parameters. Given these parameters, we can obtain the batterys lifetime or its actual capacity. A batterys discharge pattern has an important role on the batterys performance. Figure 2 shows the batterys capacity considering the discharge pattern given by SI = {30, 2, 20} mA and St = {8, 6, 6} ms. This means that the discharge electric current is 30 mA, 2 mA, and 20 mA for the intervals of 8 ms, 6 ms and 6 ms, respectively. Figure 2 shows the recovery effect (between 8 ms and 14 ms) captured by Rakhmatov-Vrudhula model due to a variation on the discharge current from 30 mA to 2 mA, and the results for the linear model showing that, because it does not capture the recovery effect, it actually computes a reduction

547

245950

247500 245000
Battery Capacity - mA-ms

245910 245890
Linear model

245900

242500 240000

245870

245850

Battery Capacity - mA-ms

237500 235000 232500 230000 232412.40 DC = 13497.60

245850 245830 245810 245790 245770 245750

Rx

Battery Capacity - mA-ms

Switching Time 2 Sleep

245800

245750

6 Time (s)

10

12

Switching Time 1
Rx

245700

245650 Rakhmatov-Vrudhula model 245600

245638.96
DC = 271,04

6 Time (s)

10

12

10 12 Time (ms)

14

16

18

20

Figure 3. Linear model Rakhmatov-Vrudhula model.

versus

the

Figure 4. Analyzing the switching energy

4. Switching Energy
Switching Energy [14] (SE) refers to the energy related to the transitioning of a node to a different state (e.g., transitioning from a transmission state to a sleeping state). Depending on the type of the transition, it can consume or it can recover some battery capacity. In this Paper, the parameter SE is represented in mA-ms units (see Section 3). Even though there is no transition when performing the blind ooding of a message, we present an insight into the details of transitioning a node to a different state. This will provide the basics for planning a broadcast mechanism that takes advantage of transitioning to a sleeping state after the transmission of the rst copy of a broadcast message. We plan to investigate how to take advantage of the SE in a future work regarding power saving broadcasting. Figure 4 shows that when a node transitions from the receive mode to the sleeping mode the battery actually recovers some energy (i.e., Switching Time 1, ST1 ), and when the node transitions back to the receiving mode (after a sleeping period) the node spends some energy during the process (shown as Switching Time 2, ST2 ). During the sleep state we observe that the node acquires most of its recovered battery capacity. It is important to mention that it is possible to observe the battery capacity recovery due to the Rakhmatov-Vrudhula battery model. The adoption of a simpler battery model (e.g., the linear model) can lead to wrong conclusions when analyzing the transitioning phase of a node. If that is the case, one can conclude that the switching energy always implies the reduction of the battery capacity. There are only a few previous work [10, 13] taking into account the switching energy when evaluating the perfor-

Table 1. Transition times (in s) for the radios TM TM TR1000 [7] and CC1000 [4]
Radio Rate/Modulation TxSleep RxSleep SleepTx SleepRx 10 10 10 10 10 10 16 16 850 20 20 850

TR1000 19.2 Kbps/OOK TR1000 115.2 Kbps/ASK CC1000 38.4 Kbps/OOK

mance of WSN in terms of energy consumption. In most cases the switching energy is neglected to simplify the simulations. However, in energy constrained networks like the WSNs, it becomes relevant to consider all the gains due to the battery capacity recovery effect when evaluating the network lifetime. Table 1 presents the switching time results of each operaTM TM tional mode for the radios TR1000 [7] and CC1000 [4]. These radios integrate a great part of the sensor devices (e.g., Berkeley Mica e Mica2 Motes) actually deployed in WSNs. The current values corresponding to each one of these states are presented in Table 2.

Table 2. Current (in mA) for each operaTM tional state for the radios TR1000 [7] and TM CC1000 [4].
Radio TR1000 TR1000 CC1000 Data Rate/Modulation 19.2 Kbps / OOK 115.2 Kbps / ASK 38.4 Kbps / FSK IT x 12.00 12.00 27.00 IRx 4.50 4.80 10.00 ISleep 0.005 0.005 0.001

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5. Performance Analysis
Most WSN protocols resort to broadcasting of control messages for achieving their purpose. For example, on demand routing protocols apply blind ooding when searching for a route to any given destination (even though expanding ring search is usually employed to reduce the impact of ooding to the whole network, blind ooding is employed after expanding the ring to some extent). Given that, we have chosen to investigate the energy cost of blind ooding over WSNs using a more realistic battery model. In order to perform the performance analysis, we have incorporated the Rakhmatov model into the energy model of the network simulator ns-2 [1], because this simulator provides only the linear model. For future work, we have already included the switching energy computations, providing the mechanisms for the design and analysis of dynamic power management mechanisms. We compare the battery capacity discharge for all nodes in a WSN. We model each node with the same characteristics of the Mica Motes [5]: ATMEL ATMega128L processor (active mode current of 8 mA, inactive mode current of 15 A), CC1000 Radio (Tx mode = 27 mA, Rx mode = 10 mA, inactive mode = 10 mA, and sleep mode = 1 A), and power supply composed of two AA alkaline batteries. The network is composed of 50 nodes spread over an area of 1500 m X 300 m. Simulations are repeated 10 times, for 900 s of simulation time. IEEE 802.11 is used as the Phy/MAC layer protocol, and the random waypoint model with no pause time and constant speed of 1 m is used s for modeling node mobility. Blind ooding is implemented by the FLOOD protocol [8]. To reduce the chance of packet collision, re-broadcasts are delayed with a random average jitter of 10 ms. A sensor node is randomly selected as the broadcast source, sending 2 packets of 512 Bytes per second during the whole simulation time. Table 3 summarizes the simulation parameters. Table 4 presents the simulation results regarding the battery capacity consumption for both battery models under consideration. It is shown that the linear model presents results far from a more realistic scenario. The linear model does not provide useful insight on the real battery consumption of a node, showing a consumption roughly 500 times larger than the Rakhmatov-Vrudhula model. The linear model is easy to implement, but does not provide meaningful results. On the other hand, the Rakhmatov-Vrudhula model provides realistic results because it captures the nonlinear battery behavior at the expense of being more compute intensive. Anyway, only when having a realistic battery model we are able to have a better idea about the network lifetime resulting from running any protocol in a WSN.

Table 3. Simulation parameters Parameter Processor Unit Number of nodes Terrain Radio Range Simulation time Mobility model Pause time Speed Radio Specication Active = 8 mA, Inactive = 15 A 50 nodes 1500 m X 300 m 250 m 900 s random waypoint mode none 1
m s

Tx = 27 mA, Rx = 10 mA, Sleep = 1 A

Battery Capacity C=245910 mA-ms, Voc =1.5V, Vco =0.8V

Table 4. Simulation Results: Linear Model (LM) versus Rakhmatov Model (RM)
Sample RM Consumption (J) LM Consumption (J) Difference 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Average STDEV 0.4589 0.4568 0.4549 0.4578 0.4581 0.4582 0.4591 0.4588 0.4543 0.4579 0.4575 0.002 217.4578 214.4649 214.9555 217.7323 217.9829 218.0857 218.9160 218.6305 216.8960 217.2920 214.9555 1.48 473.81 469.50 472.53 475.60 475.87 475.96 476.88 476.57 477.42 475.65 474.98 2.41

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6. Conclusion
Network simulators usually employ the linear discharge model. This model is simple, but far from reality, leading to wrong conclusions like, for example, that switching energy necessarily implies on energy consumption. To better understand the impact of a more realistic battery model on the simulation of a WSN, we compared the results of blind ooding using the standard battery model (i.e., linear model) to the results obtained using the RakhmatovVrudhula battery model which captures the battery nonlinear behavior. The results show that the actual battery capacity discharge can actually be several times smaller than the values computed using the linear model, leanding to wrong conclusions regarding the performance and the corresponding network lifetime when applying any protocol in a WSN. We have already implemented the computation of the switching energy (SE) in the ns-2 simulator. For future work, we plan the design and analyze the performance of power saving broadcasting mechanisms. By taking into account the SE, we can actually analyze when it pays off to transition a node to a sleeping state without reducing the efciency of the broadcast protocol.

[10] S. Park and M. B. Srivastava. Dynamic battery state aware approaches for improving battery utilization. Proceedings of CASES 02, pages 225231, 2002. [11] V. Raghunathan, C. Schurgers, S. Park, and M. B. Srivastava. Energy-aware wireless microsensor networks. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine,, 19(2):4050, March 2002. [12] D. Rakhmatov and S. Vrudhula. An analytical high-level battery model for use in energy management of portable electronic systems. Proc. of ICCAD,, pages 16, 2001. [13] A. G. Ruzzeli, G. M. P. OHare, T. Tynan, P. C. , and J. M. Havingat. Protocol assessment issues in low duty cycle sensor networks: The switching energy. SUTC 06: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Sensor Networks, pages 136143, 2006. [14] P. S. Sausen, J. R. B. Sousa, M. A. Spohn, A. Perkusich, and A. M. N. Lima. Dynamic power management with scheduled switching modes in wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 15th IEEE Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), pages 18, Istanbul, Turkey, October 2007.

Acknowledgment
This work was partialy funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientco e Tecnol gico - CNPq - Brazil, o under grant 470342/2007-2.

References
[1] The network simulator. http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/. [2] Panasonic: Panasonic industrial alkaline batteries data sheet, 2007. [3] I. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, and E. Cayirci. A Survey on Sensor Networks. IEEE Communications Magazine, pages 102114, August 2002. [4] Chipcon. Chipcon products: Cc1000 datasheet. http://www.chipcon.com, 2007. [5] Crossbow. Crossbow technology inc. data sheet:. http://www.xbow.com, 2007. [6] M. Handy and D. Timmermann. Simulation of mobile wireless networks with accurate modelling of non-linear battery effects. IASTED-ASM,, pages 532537, 2003. [7] R. M. Inc. Rf monolithics, inc.:tr1000 datasheet. http://www.rfm.com, 2007. [8] T. Kunz. Multicasting in mobile ad-hoc networks: Achieving high packet delivery ratios. In The Proceding of the Anual Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Reseach, pages 115, 2003. [9] K. Lahiri, A. Raghunathan, S. Dey, and D. Panigrahi. Battery-driven system design: a new frontier in low power design. IEEE Comp. Society - VLSID,, pages 17, 2002.

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