Current Research

Wireless Sensor Network Management Protocol

Purpose of the Research

The emerging wireless sensor networks (WSN) and services have some of the following features: smart, autonomy, context-aware, and self-awareness, security, new models of services and the interaction with improved security and privacy. These features produce new technologies and networking architectures and exhibit huge challenges to render robust services, security, and management. Thus, network management becomes extremely important and vital in order to keep the whole network and application working properly.

To realize such abilities, this research aims to develop a management protocol that collects information about node energy level, communication power, topology, link state, traffic and coverage of the network to optimize, under resource constraints, the operational and functional properties of wireless sensor networks in terms of the lifetime, accuracy, precision, latency, secrecy, integrity, etc.

In this research, I will enable autonomous sensor task selection based on detected events; provide distributed algorithms for adjusting power, and use bandwidth and setting rates. These algorithms will direct the configuration of the network. I will also examine the impact of in-network processing on the algorithms for configuring the network.

Technical Approach

To achieve the overall objectives, and to optimize them under constraints, several sub problems need to be addressed: (1) monitoring the WSN and the sensor nodes, (2) (re)configuring the WSN and the sensor nodes, (3) managing the sensory data and updating distribution mechanisms as shown in Fig. 1.

  • Monitoring management task. This task should be capable of collecting all information about the network topology (e.g. link state, traffic, and coverage), all sensor node properties (including sensor node hardware details e.g. chip and transceiver), sensor node software details (e.g. operating system versions), and dynamic properties (e.g. battery), as well as all measured sensory data.

  • The (re)configuration task. Based on the information and network states mentioned in (1), the (re)configuration task, which includes sensor node configuration and network configuration, should perform periodic sleep and awake (for power management), wireless bandwidth usage (traffic management), error recovery and network reconfiguration. Thus, the sensor network management system should enable the network to be self-forming, self-organizing, and ideally self-configuring in the event of failures without prior knowledge of the network topology. The goal of this task is the optimal network configuration, which is a large problem composed of a wide range of optimization problems.

  • Managing the sensory data and updating distribution mechanisms. This task performs the operating system and the application updates. For information gathering, the mechanism will provide the algorithms that assign specific sensor sets to an application's task. For information dissemination, this will provide a suitable set of information required by users and schedule the information delivery under the given networking constraints.