Wireless Sensor Networks

Mixalis Ombashis

ECE-654
Advanced Networks

Instructor: Dr. Christos Panayiotou

 Outline
Introduction

Design Factors
Fault Tolerance
Scalability
Production Cost
Hardware Constrains

Protocol Stack
Physical Layer
Data link Layer

Cross layer Protocols For WSN

XCP
XLM
 What Is A Sensor ?
A sensor (also called detector) is a converter that
measures a physical quantity and converts it into a
signal which can be read by an observer or by an
(today mostly electronic) instrument.
 Area
Monitoring Applications
Environmental
Sensing

Military
Applications

Health

Fire Detection

Home
Automation
 Introduction
Sensor Node Components
 Introduction
Sensor Position
Need to be engineered or predetermined
Random Deployment in inaccessible terrains
Disaster Relief Operations

Self organizing Capabilities

Protocols
Algorithms

Local Computation
Transmit Only Required Partially Processed Data
 Centralized Approach where all sensors readings are gathered at a sink
(Directed Diffusion)

Stationary Sink Pre determined Position

 Implementation of
Sensor Field - Sink - User
 Two-Tier Data
Dissemination Model
For Large Scale WSN

Locations are known through the

use of GPS and localization
algorithms

Homogeneous Sensor nodes

Short Range Radio

Multiple Hops for long distances

Sinks query the network

Two level Flooding

 Design Factors
Fault Tolerance
Nodes May Fail, Blocked or Physical Damaged

Ability to sustain functionalities without any

interruption due to sensor node failures
 Source of Faults in WSN Applications
Node Faults
Network Faults
Sink Faults

Failure Classification
Crash or Omission
Timing
Value
Arbitrary
 Design Factors
Fault detection techniques
Self-Diagnosis
Group Detection: Only if a reference value is available
Hierarchical Detection: Trees
Fault recovery techniques
Active replication
1. Multipath routing
2. Sensor value aggregation
3. Ignore values from faulty nodes
Passive replication
1. Node selection
a) Self-election : Probabilistic Algorithms
b) Group election: Clusters With Cluster Heads
c) Hierarchical election
2. Service Distribution
a) Pre-Copy: Make The Code of All nodes available on all nodes before deployment
b) Code distribution
c) Remote Execution
 Design Factors
Scalability
Number of Deployed nodes vary from hundreds to thousands or
millions depending on the applications
Density has to be utilized:

N is the number of scattered nodes

R is the ratio transmission range
(R) gives the number of nodes within the transmission radius of each node in
region A

Production Cost
Obviously has to be low
 Design Factors
Hardware Constrains
May need to fit into a matchbox-sized module
Consume Extremely Low Power

Environment
Unattended in Remote geographic areas
Bottom of an ocean
Battlefield
 Design Factors
Transmission Media
Wireless Medium: Radio, Infrared
Power Consumption
Limited Power Source
May be Impossible to Replenish Power Source
The malfunctioning of few nodes can cause
significant topological changes and might require
rerouting of packets and reorganization of the
network
Protocol Stack

Management
Planes
 Protocol Stack
Management Planes
Power Management Plane:
Manage how a sensor node uses its power
Mobility Management Plane:
Detects and registers the movement of sensor nodes, so a
route back to the user is always maintained and the sensor
nodes can keep track of who their neighbour sensors are
Task Management Plane:
Sensor can work together in a power efficient way, route
data in a mobile sensor network, and share resources
between sensor nodes
 Protocol Stack
The Physical Layer
Responsible for
Frequency selection
Carrier frequency generation
Signal detection
Modulation
Data encryption
 The Physical Layer
Requirements
The radio must be containable in a small device,
since the sensor nodes are small

The radios must be cheap, since the sensors will

be used in large numbers in redundant fashion

The radio technology must work with higher layers

in the protocol stack to consume very low power
levels
 The Physical Layer
Signal propagation effects
Power required to transmit a signal is Proportional
to dn , ( 2 < 4 )
n closer to 4 for low-lying antennas and near
ground channels, due to signal cancellation by a
ground-reflected ray.
Multihop communication in a sensor network can
effectively overcome shadowing and path loss
effects, if the node density is high enough
 Protocol Stack
The Data Link Layer
Responsible for
Multiplexing of data streams
Data frame detection
Medium Access Control
Error Control
 Medium Access Control (MAC)
Two Goals:
1. Creation of the network infrastructure
2. Share communication resources between sensor nodes
Collision avoidance
Energy efficiency
Scalability in node density
Why existing MAC protocols cant be used?
The primary goal of the existing MAC protocol is the provision of high
QoS and bandwidth efficiency
Energy is not taken into account

MAC protocols for sensor network must have

Built-in power conservation
Mobility management
Failure recovery strategies
Medium Access Control (MAC)

Need To Turn Off The RADIO!!

 Medium Access Control (MAC)
Major sources of energy waste
Long idle time when no sensing event happens
Collisions
Overhearing
Control overhead
 MAC Protocols Proposed For Sensor
Networks
The SMACS protocol - Self-Organizing
Medium Access Control For Sensor Networks
Achieves network start-up and link-layer
organization

CSMA - Carrier Sense Multiple Access based

MAC

Hybrid TDMA/FDMA based

 SMACS protocol
Major components of SMAC
Periodic listen and sleep
Collision avoidance
Overhearing avoidance

Neighboring nodes are synchronized together

Periodic updating using a SYNC packet
Sender Node ID Next-Sleep Time
Listen interval divided into two parts
Each part further divided into time slots

RTS/CTS Similar to IEEE 802.11

Interfering nodes go to sleep after they hear the RTS or CTS packet

Power conservation is achieved by using a random wake-up schedule

during the connection phase and by turning the radio off during idle time
slots.
 CSMA Based Mac Protocol
Two important components
The listening mechanism
The back off scheme.

As reported and based on simulations

Constant listen periods are energy efficient
The introduction of random delay provides
robustness against repeated collisions
 CSMA Based Mac Protocol
Adaptive Transmission Rate Control Scheme - ARC
Achieves medium access fairness by balancing the rates
of originating and route-through traffic

The ARC controls the data origination rate of a node in

order to allow the route-through traffic to propagate.

Route-through traffic is preferred over the originating

traffic
Since dropping route-through traffic is costlier ,the associated
penalty is lesser
 Hybrid TDMA/FDMA based Protocol
Centrally controlled MAC scheme

The system is made up of energy constrained sensor nodes that

communicate to a single, nearby, high powered base station (<10
m).

While a pure TDMA scheme dedicates the full bandwidth to a single

sensor node, a pure FDMA scheme allocates minimum signal
bandwidth per node.

Optimum number of channels found to depend on the ratio of

power consumption between transmitter and receiver
If transmitter consumes more power TDMA scheme is preferred
If receiver consumes more power FDMA scheme is preferred
 The Data Link Layer
Power saving modes of operation
Turn the transceiver off when it is not required.
Not exactly
Dominance of Start-up Energy
Power saving modes of operation
Dynamic Power Management Scheme
An event occurs when a sensor node picks up a
signal with power above a predetermined
threshold.

Probability assumed to be Exponential <e-t>

 The Data Link Layer
Error Control
Two important modes of error control
Forward error correction (FEC)
Higher Decoding Complexity
If the associated processing power is greater than
the coding gain, then the whole process in energy
inefficiency and the system is better off without
coding.
Automatic repeat request (ARQ)
Limited by the additional retransmission energy
cost and overhead.
 Cross layer Protocols For WSN
Performance limitations in the layered architecture
It doesnt consider dependencies between different layers.

Two kinds of cross-layer architecture

Packet-based interaction scheme
Each layer puts all information that used for cross-layer
approaches into packet header and other layers catch interesting
information by inspecting the each packet.
Direct interaction scheme
Allows any two layers to communicate directly with one another
via new APIs

Both schemes, existing system software may need to

be modified to support new packet structures or APIs
 XCP (eXtensible Cross-layer design
Platform)
Enables the exchange of information between
different layers for performance optimization
CPL (Communication Protocol Layer),

MRL (Mutual Reference across Layer)

PO (Performance Optimization) component

 XCP (eXtensible Cross-layer design
Platform)
Procedures of process of the XCP
1. In initialization, each cross-layer module in the PO component
requests the interesting information to the MRL component
using REQUEST_INFORMATION()
2. If a cross-layer module need not more any information, it can
release the requested information using
RELEASE_INFORMATION()
3. The bus arbiter thread pops a data from information queues
and informs it to requested cross layer modules
4. When the requested information is stored at information base
in the each cross-layer module, it performs optimization
5. Then the results of optimization by each cross-layer module
are applied to information set using APPLY_INFORMATION()
 Cross-layer module (XLM)
Complete unified cross-layering

Incorporates
Initiative determination
Received based contention
Local congestion control
Distributed duty cycle operation
 Cross-layer module (XLM)
Communication in XLM is built on initiative
concept
Provides freedom for each node to decide on
participating in communication
The next-hop in each communication is not
determined in advance
 Cross-layer module (XLM)
Initiative determination procedure
A node initiates transmission by broadcasting an RTS packet to
indicate its neighbors that it has a packet to send
Upon receiving an RTS packet, each neighbor of node i decides to
participate in the communication or not
This decision is given through initiative determination
The initiative determination is a binary operation where a node
decides to participate in communication if its initiative is 1.
Denoting the initiative as I, it is determined as follows:

a) RTS signals requires that the received signal to noise ratio (SNR) of an
RTS packet,, is above some threshold
b) Prevents congestion by limiting the traffic a node can relay
c) Ensures that the node does not experience any buffer overflow
d) Ensures that the remaining energy of a node stays above a minimum
value
 Cross-layer module (XLM)
Distributed duty cycle operation
Each node is implemented with a sleep frame with length TS sec. As a result, a
node is active for TS sec and sleeps for (1 ) TS sec.

Transmission Initiation
Listens to the channel for a specific period of time
Checks if its information is correlated with the transmitting source nodes
If the channel is occupied, the node performs back off based on its contention
window
When the channel is idle, the node broadcasts an RTS packet, which contains
the location of the sensor node i and the location of the sink
When a node receives an RTS packet, it first checks the source and destination
locations

Receiver Contention
After an RTS packet is received, if a node has initiative to participate in the
communication, it performs receiver contention to forward the packet
 References
G.Hoblos, M. Staroswiecki, and A. Aitouche, Optimal Design of Fault Tolerantt Sensor Networks,
IEEE Intl. Conf. Cont. Apps., Anchorage, AK, Sept. 2000, pp. 467-72

Bulusu et al., Scalable Coordination for Wireless Sensor Networks: Self-Configuring Localization
Systems, ISCTA 2001, Ambleside, U.K., July 2001

E.Shih et al., Physical Layer Driven Protocol aand Algorithm Design for Energy-Efficient Wireless
Sensor Networks, Proc. ACM MobiCom 01, Rome, Italy, July 2001, pp 272-86

A.Sinha and A. Chandrakasan, Dynamic Power Management in Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE
Design Test Comp., Mar./April. 2001

M.-S. Pan, C.-H. Tsai, and Y.-C. Tseng, Implementation of an Emergency Guiding and Monitoring
System in Indoor 3D Environments by Wireless Sensor Networks, Technical Report of CS/NCTU
2006.

T. Melodia, M. C. Vuran, D. Pompili, The State of the Art in Cross layer Design for Wireless Sensor
Networks, to appear in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 2006.

Byounghoon Kim and Sungwoo Tak, A Communication Framework Supporting Cross-Layer Design
for Wireless Networks, IEEE Intl Symposium On Ubiquitous Multimedia Computing, Hobart,
Australia, Oct. 2008