TITLE: Hierarchical Organization for Wireless Sensor Networks:
Effectiveness and Performance Comparison

SPEAKER: Stefano Basagni, ECE, Northeastern

ABSTRACT:

The talk covers topics in wireless sensor networking that concern the
problems of network topology organization and energy efficient data
dissemination. In particular, we show how a simple backbone formation
protocol and associated stateless routing are effective in prolonging
the network lifetime up to 7 times with respect to when the same routing
is used over a flat network (i.e., a network with no hierarchical
organization). We investigate our solution with respect to different
definitions of network lifetime and different scenarios (multiple
targets roaming through the network and multiple sinks). Based on these
results, we investigate different ways for organizing a wireless sensor
network hierarchically. More specifically, we perform a performance
comparison for clustering and backbone formation protocols in large ad
hoc networks. The protocols we consider are representative of the major
paradigms for ad hoc node selection and backbone formation, namely DCA
protocol, Wu and Li's algorithm, and Wan et al.'s algorithm. Extensive
ns2-based simulation results show that simpler algorithms are rewarded
with good performance with respect to most metrics of interest, which
include per node energy consumption and message overhead. However, they
tend to produce larger backbones. On the other side, more complex
solutions produce smaller backbones at greater cost. In order to obtain
a reasonably small backbone at reasonable cost we propose an enhancement
of the DCA algorithm, termed DCA-S, which enriches the DCA backbone
construction with a recently proposed and resource effective
sparsification rule. DCA-S leads to a robust backbone close in size to
that generated by the Wan et al. protocol without significantly
degrading the performance in terms of all the other relevant metrics.

Friday, November 12, 2004
3:30pm
164 WVH
Northeastern University