Jo Mar 24, 2022

Any application including ecological environment monitoring, target tracking, traffic control and agriculture surveillance needs a routing technique for forwarding data sensed by sensor nodes to the base station (BS) or the monitoring centre through several relay nodes.

In topology such as tree or mesh structures used in many applications, sensor nodes are often distributed randomly in areas beyond the reach of people. However, in a one-dimensional queue WSN, nodes are uniformly and densely deployed on a line and this type of network offers many applications such as ecological environment monitoring system along a river, fire monitoring and controlling system along a corridor, smart traffic monitoring system along a road, a tunnel or a bridge, and petroleum pipeline remote monitoring system. In such a one-dimensional queue WSN, the geographical location of each node is fixed, the distance between two neighboring nodes is always uniform, and sensed data can only be forwarded in one direction to the BS. Because of this, the network becomes more unreliable and has high probability that it may be partitioned if some continuous nodes have run out of their energy. Therefore, it should be a key factor of designing a routing protocol in one-dimensional WSNs to ensure energy efficiency and sensed data relay latency by balancing and optimizing energy consumption.

Existing routing protocols in WSNs including a one-dimensional queue WSN attempt to find the path of minimum energy consumption from the source node to the BS to achieve optimal energy consumption because transmitting data consumes much more energy than collecting data.

In one-dimensional queue WSNs, the network topology is linear, so the identification of each node is unique and continuous and the geographical position is certain. From such characteristics, the application of an algorithm that includes a sleep mode in the routing design through timeslot allocation could prolong the network lifetime by ensuring energy efficiency and also satisfy the requirement of sensed data relay latency considering the interference between nodes in some degrees.

This is a distributed energy-efficient opportunistic routing algorithm accompanied by timeslot allocation (DEEOR-TA) using specific network topology of a one-dimensional queue wireless sensor network.

DEEOR-TA algorithm is run in several rounds and each round involves two phases, i.e. clustering-based routing tree construction accompanied by timeslot allocation and data transmission.

Four measurable metrics are defined to evaluate the performance of DEEOR-TA in a one-dimensional queue WSN, i.e. average of residual energy, variation of residual energy, number of dead nodes, and network lifetime.

The simulation results show that the proposed protocol supports better energy efficiency than other existing protocols, and therefore, it can help to prolong the network lifetime.

This paper titled “A distributed energy-efficient opportunistic routing accompanied by timeslot allocation in wireless sensor networks” presented by Ri Man Gun, an institute head at the Faculty of Communication, is carried in the SCI Journal “International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks”.