Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted substantial research interest, especially in the context of performing monitoring and surveillance tasks. However, it is challenging to strike compelling tradeoffs amongst the various conflicting optimization criteria, such as the network’s energy dissipation, packet-loss rate, coverage, and lifetime. This paper provides a tutorial and survey of recent research and development efforts addressing this issue by using the technique of multi-objective optimization (MOO). First, we provide an overview of the main optimization objectives used in WSNs. Then, we elaborate on various prevalent approaches conceived for MOO, such as the family of mathematical programming-based scalarization methods, the family of heuristics/metaheuristics-based optimization algorithms, and a variety of other advanced optimization techniques. Furthermore, we summarize a range of recent studies of MOO in the context of WSNs, which are intended to provide useful guidelines for researchers to understand the referenced literature. Finally, we discuss a range of open problems to be tackled by future research.

/pdf/a-survey-of-multi-objective-optimization-in-wireless-sensor-329pcv7jcj.pdf

A Survey of Multi-Objective Optimization in Wireless Sensor Networks: Metrics, Algorithms, and Open Problems

Energy savings optimization becomes one of the major concerns in the wireless sensor network (WSN) routing protocol design, due to the fact that most sensor nodes are equipped with the limited nonrechargeable battery power. In this paper, we focus on minimizing energy consumption and maximizing network lifetime for data relay in one-dimensional (1-D) queue network. Following the principle of opportunistic routing theory, multihop relay decision to optimize the network energy efficiency is made based on the differences among sensor nodes, in terms of both their distance to sink and the residual energy of each other. Specifically, an Energy Saving via Opportunistic Routing (ENS_OR) algorithm is designed to ensure minimum power cost during data relay and protect the nodes with relatively low residual energy. Extensive simulations and real testbed results show that the proposed solution ENS_OR can significantly improve the network performance on energy saving and wireless connectivity in comparison with other existing WSN routing schemes.

Opportunistic Routing Algorithm for Relay Node Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks

The great advances made in the wireless technology have enabled the deployment of wireless communication networks in some of the harshest environments such as volcanoes, hurricane-affected regions, and underground mines. In such challenging environments suffering from the lack of infrastructure, traditional routing is not efficient and sometimes not even feasible. Moreover, the exponential growth of the number of wireless connected devices has created the need for a new routing paradigm that could benefit from the potentials offered by these heterogeneous wireless devices. Hence, in order to overcome the traditional routing limitations, and to increase the capacity of current dynamic heterogeneous wireless networks, the opportunistic routing paradigm has been proposed and developed in recent research works. Motivated by the great interest that has been attributed to this new paradigm within the last decade, we provide a comprehensive survey of the existing literature related to opportunistic routing. We first study the main design building blocks of opportunistic routing. Then, we provide a taxonomy for opportunistic routing proposals, based on their routing objectives as well as the optimization tools and approaches used in the routing design. Hence, five opportunistic routing classes are defined and studied in this paper, namely, geographic opportunistic routing, link-state-aware opportunistic routing, probabilistic opportunistic routing, optimization-based opportunistic routing, and cross-layer opportunistic routing. We also review the main protocols proposed in the literature for each class. Finally, we identify and discuss the main future research directions related to the opportunistic routing design, optimization, and deployment.

A Survey on Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Communication Networks

QoS routing is an important research issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially for mission-critical monitoring and surveillance systems which requires timely and reliable data delivery. Existing work exploits multipath routing to guarantee both reliability and delay QoS constraints in WSNs. However, the multipath routing approach suffers from a significant energy cost. In this work, we exploit the geographic opportunistic routing (GOR) for QoS provisioning with both end-to-end reliability and delay constraints in WSNs. Existing GOR protocols are not efficient for QoS provisioning in WSNs, in terms of the energy efficiency and computation delay at each hop. To improve the efficiency of QoS routing in WSNs, we define the problem of efficient GOR for multiconstrained QoS provisioning in WSNs, which can be formulated as a multiobjective multiconstraint optimization problem. Based on the analysis and observations of different routing metrics in GOR, we then propose an Efficient QoS-aware GOR (EQGOR) protocol for QoS provisioning in WSNs. EQGOR selects and prioritizes the forwarding candidate set in an efficient manner, which is suitable for WSNs in respect of energy efficiency, latency, and time complexity. We comprehensively evaluate EQGOR by comparing it with the multipath routing approach and other baseline protocols through ns-2 simulation and evaluate its time complexity through measurement on the MicaZ node. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the GOR approach for QoS provisioning in WSNs. EQGOR significantly improves both the end-to-end energy efficiency and latency, and it is characterized by the low time complexity.

QoS Aware Geographic Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

The performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is affected by the lossy communication medium, application diversity, dense deployment, limited processing power and storage capacity, frequent topology change. All these limitations provide significant and unique design challenges to data transport control in wireless sensor networks. An effective transport protocol should consider reliable message delivery, energy-efficiency, quality of service and congestion control. The latter is vital for achieving a high throughput and a long network lifetime. Despite the huge number of protocols proposed in the literature, congestion control in WSN remains challenging. A review and taxonomy of the state-of-the-art protocols from the literature up to 2013 is provided in this paper. First, depending on the control policy, the protocols are divided into resource control vs. traffic control. Traffic control protocols are either reactive or preventive (avoiding). Reactive solutions are classified following the reaction scale, while preventive solutions are split up into buffer limitation vs. interference control. Resource control protocols are classified according to the type of resource to be tuned.

Congestion Control Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Opportunistic routing, has been shown to improve the network throughput, by allowing nodes that overhear the transmission and closer to the destination to participate in forwarding packets, i.e., in forwarder list. The nodes in forwarder list are prioritized and the lower priority forwarder will discard the packet if the packet has been forwarded by a higher priority forwarder. One challenging problem is to select and prioritize forwarder list such that a certain network performance is optimized. In this paper, we focus on selecting and prioritizing forwarder list to minimize energy consumption by all nodes. We study both cases where the transmission power of each node is fixed or dynamically adjustable. We present an energy-efficient opportunistic routing strategy, denoted as EEOR. Our extensive simulations in TOSSIM show that our protocol EEOR performs better than the well-known ExOR protocol (when adapted in sensor networks) in terms of the energy consumption, the packet loss ratio, and the average delivery delay.

/pdf/energy-efficient-opportunistic-routing-in-wireless-sensor-1w4dv8b043.pdf

Xiahua Xu

Papers

Energy-Efficient Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks