Topology Control for Reliable Sensor-to-sink Data Transport and Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have a wide range of applications: environmental monitoring, smart spaces, medical systems, military operations, and robotic exploration. These networks are fundamentally resource-constrained in terms of size, battery, cost, and infrastructure. These networks are envisioned to contain thousands (if not millions) of sensor nodes in the near future, more scalable and energy-efficient ways of operating the network are needed. We propose a topology control approach for developing scalable protocols in sensor networks and, in particular, address the energy-efficient coverage and reliable data transport protocols for efficient networking. Due to memory space, energy storage, and communication bandwidth, a need arises for an in-network aggregation of sensory data. We propose a sensor-to-sink transport protocol, which is suitable for data aggregation and provides reliable upstream packet delivery by dynamically configuring inactive nodes as “monitors” to assist in quick loss detection and recovery. Our ns-2-based simulations show significant performance improvements over other transport schemes in terms of throughput and data delivery rate under scenarios with intermittent traffic load and unpredictable node failures.