Hierarchical routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a very important topic that has been attracting the research community in the last decade. Typical hierarchical routing is called clustering routing, in which the network is divided into multiple clusters. Recently, some types of atypical hierarchical routing arise, including chain-based, tree-based, grid-based routing, and area-based routing. There are several survey papers that present and compare the hierarchical routing protocols from various perspectives, but a survey on atypical hierarchical routing is still missing. This paper makes a first attempt to provide a comprehensive review on atypical hierarchical routing. We offer a classification of atypical hierarchical routing of WSNs, and give detailed analysis of different logical topologies. The most representative atypical hierarchical routing protocols are described, discussed, and qualitatively compared. In particular, the advantages and disadvantages of different atypical hierarchical routing protocols are analyzed with respect to their significant performances and application scenarios. Finally, we put forward some open issues concerning the design of hierarchical WSNs. This survey aims to provide useful guidance for system designers on how to evaluate and select appropriate logical topologies and hierarchical routing protocols for specific applications.

Atypical Hierarchical Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review

The past few years have witnessed increased interest among researchers in cluster-based protocols for homogeneous networks because of their better scalability and higher energy efficiency than other routing protocols. Given the limited capabilities of sensor nodes in terms of energy resources, processing and communication range, the cluster-based protocols should be compatible with these constraints in either the setup state or steady data transmission state. With focus on these constraints, we classify routing protocols according to their objectives and methods towards addressing the shortcomings of clustering process on each stage of cluster head selection, cluster formation, data aggregation and data communication. We summarize the techniques and methods used in these categories, while the weakness and strength of each protocol is pointed out in details. Furthermore, taxonomy of the protocols in each phase is given to provide a deeper understanding of current clustering approaches. Ultimately based on the existing research, a summary of the issues and solutions of the attributes and characteristics of clustering approaches and some open research areas in cluster-based routing protocols that can be further pursued are provided.

A Survey on the Taxonomy of Cluster-Based Routing Protocols for Homogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

With the advancement of MEMS technologies, wireless networks consist of tiny sensor devices hold the promise of revolutionizing sensing in a wide range of application domains because of their flexibility, low cost and ease of deployment. However, the constrained computation power, battery power, storage capacity and communication bandwidth of the tiny devices pose challenging problems in the design and deployment of such systems. Target localization using acoustic signal with tiny wireless devices is a particularly difficult task due to the amount of signal processing and computation involved. In this paper, we provide an in-depth study of designing such wireless sensor networks for real-world acoustic tracking applications. We layout a cluster-based architecture to address the limitations of the tiny sensing devices. To achieve effective utilization of the scarce wireless bandwidth, a quality-driven paradigm to suppress redundant information and resolve contention is proposed. One instance of the quality-driven approach is implemented in the acoustic tracking system, where the quality of the tracking reports can be quantified numerically. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture and protocols using a sensor network testbed based on UCBerkeley mica motes. Considering the performance limitations of tiny sensor devices, the achieved acoustic target tracking accuracy is extraordinarily good. Our experimental study also shows that the acoustic target tracking quality can be indeed measured and used to assist resource allocation decisions. This application-driven design and implementation exercises also serve to identify important areas of further work in in-network processing and communications.

Acoustic target tracking using tiny wireless sensor devices

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the key enabling technologies for the internet of things (IoT). WSNs play a major role in data communications in applications such as home, health care, environmental monitoring, smart grids, and transportation. WSNs are used in IoT applications and should be secured and energy efficient in order to provide highly reliable data communications. Because of the constraints of energy, memory and computational power of the WSN nodes, clustering algorithms are considered as energy efficient approaches for resource-constrained WSNs. In this paper, we present a survey of the state-of-the-art routing techniques in WSNs. We first present the most relevant previous work in routing protocols surveys then highlight our contribution. Next, we outline the background, robustness criteria, and constraints of WSNs. This is followed by a survey of different WSN routing techniques. Routing techniques are generally classified as flat, hierarchical, and location-based routing. This survey focuses on the deep analysis of WSN hierarchical routing protocols. We further classify hierarchical protocols based on their routing techniques. We carefully choose the most relevant state-of-the-art protocols in order to compare and highlight the advantages, disadvantage and performance issues of each routing technique. Finally, we conclude this survey by presenting a comprehensive survey of the recent improvements of low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy routing protocols and a comparison of the different versions presented in the literature.

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Hierarchical routing protocols for wireless sensor network: a compressive survey

A monitoring system for real-time interference control on large construction sites

Tree routing (TR) is a low-overhead routing protocol designated for simple, low-cost and low-power wireless sensor networks. It avoids flooding the network with path search and update messages in order to conserve bandwidth and energy by using only parent-child links for packet forwarding. The major drawback of TR is the increased hop-counts as compared with more sophisticated path search protocols. We propose an enhanced tree routing (ETR) strategy for sensor networks which have structured node address assignment schemes. In addition to the parent-child links, ETR also uses links to other one-hop neighbours if it is decided that this will lead to a shorter path. It is shown that such a decision can be made with minimum storage and computing cost by utilizing the address structure. Detailed algorithms for applying ETR to ZigBee networks are also presented. Simulation results reveal that ETR not only outperforms TR in terms of hop-counts, but also is more energy-efficient than TR.

Enhanced tree routing for wireless sensor networks

Self-healing is an important feature of robust and reliable wireless sensor networks. ZigBee is an industrial standard widely adopted for wireless sensor networks. We propose an efficient process for a ZigBee network to repair itself after node failure or communication breakdown. It allows a disconnected subnet to rejoin the network with minimum message exchanges and, therefore, saves time and energy. This efficiency is achieved by letting a disconnected node to reconnect to the network together with as many descendant nodes as possible. Theoretical and simulation evaluations confirm the efficiency of the proposed process.

An efficient self-healing process for ZigBee sensor networks

As one of the most dominant factors in clustered wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the selection of cluster-head (CH) can impact the network performance. The selection shall be subject to at least two factors. (i) The number of CHs may vary in different periods of the WSN lifetime. And (ii) this number can determine on the performance, in terms of energy consumption and WSN lifetime, etc. In this paper, we draw attention to the randomly deployed WSNs based on the independent homogeneous Poisson process, and propose an Improved Cluster-head Selection (ICS) approach. Firstly, we optimize the dynamic number of CHs. Then we obtain the suitable CHs via the improved selection procedures based on three selection phases by introducing the temporary clusters. Meanwhile, CECC-based (Common Energy Consumption Cycle) synchronization is used to coordinate the intra-/inter-cluster communication. ICS saves the energy consumption and prolongs the network lifetime. Simulation demonstrates the enhanced network performance.

An Improved Cluster-head Selection approach in wireless sensor networks

In clustered wireless sensor networks, cluster-heads (CHs) are the key. And the CH selection methods can affect the efficiency of the cluster and even influence the lifetime of an energy-constrained network. In this paper, we propose the Energy-consumption-cycle based Cluster-heads Selection (ECHS) protocol. ECHS selects CHs via two phases. In the first phase, CH candidates are chosen based on an adaptable energy threshold and the status of neighbor nodes. In the second phase, each candidate computes its own Energy Consumption Cycles (ECC), which is relevant to the CH candidate’s residual energy and the energy consumption when communicating with its neighbor nodes. The ECC actually evaluates the lifetime of the potential cluster. Hence the CH candidate with both higher residual energy and higher ECC has more possibility to be the CH. By comparing ECC, the suitable CHs can be obtained. Simulation results illustrate that ECHS protocol prolongs the network lifetime and also increases the amount of data received at BS.

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An Energy-Efficient Cluster-Head Selection Protocol for Energy-Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

We investigate the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC (Medium Access Control) sublayer in beacon-enabled tree-topologyWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). To our knowledge, current literature has mostly focused on relatively simpler star topology or non-beacon-enabled peer-to-peer networks. In our work, we first respectively evaluate the impact of different traffic loads from the source nodes in each depth. Then we investigate the network performance with respect to different beacon orders. In both scenarios, the effects of different number of hops between source nodes and the sink are evaluated. NS-2 simulation results reveal that the traffic loads play a more important role than beacon orders. Furthermore higher depths (hops) severely affect the network performance

Peng Hao

Papers

Enhanced tree routing for wireless sensor networks

An efficient self-healing process for ZigBee sensor networks

An Improved Cluster-head Selection approach in wireless sensor networks

An Energy-Efficient Cluster-Head Selection Protocol for Energy-Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC in Beacon-Enabled Tree-Topology Wireless Sensor Networks