Improving Routing Protocols of WSN in WHSN

Ruochen Tan, Yang Xu, Zheng Chen

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Chengdu 611731, P.R.China
xuyang@uestc.edu.cn
Min Zha, Tina Tsou
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Shenzhen 518129,P.R.China
zhamin@huawei.com
AbstractBattery consumed node is typical in wireless sensor
networks, but in the newly developed applications in household,
we have found a new character that some nodes could be
deployed inside the household appliances and use AC as its power
supply, which are called as plug-in nodes. Unlike battery
consumed nodes, they could transmit data without the limitation
of energy consumption, which is a key challenge of traditional
WSNs. In this paper, we introduced the wireless home sensor
networks with the plug-in nodes. By taking the advantage of
plug-in nodes for energy consumption free, we discussed and
modified traditional protocols in WHSN, such as LEACH, SPIN
and DD, brought out LEACH-Pi, SPIN-Pi and DD-Pi, by
modifying their voting, assessment, and routing algorithms to
greatly improve their performance, life time and response time of
network, and energy consume.
Keywords-Wireless home sensor network; Battery consumed
node; Plug-innode; Routing protocol; Energy consumption.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless Sensor Network(WSN)[1][2] is a very potential
field, it is applied to home environment and has got more and
more attention. In the existing WSN standard Zigbee[3], there
are two kinds of nodes-- Full Function Device (FFD)and
Reduced Function Device (RFD).The main routing protocols of
WSN are designed based on this hypothesis. In the recent
construction of WHSNs, the author has found that there are a
lot of household appliances in a home which nodes can be
embedded in by using the power line. Nodes have unlimited
power supply in this way. It makes this type of nodes have a
significant difference from FFD. They can do a lot of
computing and data transmission without considering energy
consumption which is one of the most important problems of
WSN. If we take the advantages of it, we will design a more
suitable WHSN. Based on these discoveries, we introduced a
new kind of nodes--plug-in nodes in WSN to transform WHSN
into Wireless Home Sensor Network with Plug-in Nodes
(WHSN-Pi), and to improve the existing routing protocols with
the WHSN-Pis features, we used the plug-in nodes to take
place of the high energy consumption nodes such as the
cluster-head in LEACH. The energy consumption of battery
consumed nodes has been reduced, and the lifetime of the
network has been extended in this way.
This article is organized as follows: Section1introducedthe
content of this paper roughly. Section 2 introduced the relevant
background knowledge. Section 3discussed and modified
traditional protocols in WHSN, such as LEACH, SPIN and DD,
brought out LEACH-Pi, SPIN-Pi and DD-Pi, by modify their
voting, assessment, and routing algorithms to greatly improve
their performance, life time and response time of network, and
energy consume.
II. RELATED WORKS
A. Wireless home sensor network
Wireless home sensor network (WHSN) uses WSN
technology to connect electrical devices with communication
devices that can provide a smart house and easier life for users.
Because of the advantages of WHSN and the huge consumer
group, many researchers have begun to work on it.
Organizations such as ITU-T have published some standards
(for example Home-networking requirements for cable-based
services [4][5] etc.) to rule the device description files, the
communication protocols of the master network and the subnet,
and the network system architectures of the WHSN. The
routing protocols of WHSN are based on the WSNs net
standardZigbee. 6LoWPAN [6] is IPv6 implementation
based on the IEEE 802.15.4 [7]. Its purpose is to achieve IPv6
protocol on low-power wireless devices. 6LoWPAN based
WHSN is the use of IP technology in WSNs for families of all
devices are assigned an IP address that users can easily
communicate with the devices of family via internet from
outside of house, and in IPv6, the large number of addresses
can fully meet the WHSN device address assignment.
B. Sensors in WHSN
WHSN nodes are usually divided into two categories: FFD
and RFD.
FFD can be used as sensor nodes, but also as a network
coordinator, which can communicate with any other devices,
transmit data sent by the RFD to other devices.
RFD is only used as a sensor node. It can only
communicates with FFD, and send its measured data via FFD.
In a recent construction project on WHSN, the author found
that the energy consumption of FFD which is used as both the
sensor nodes and the network coordinators will be very large,
and the dormancy period of the FFD which is used as a
network coordinator is shorter than the RFD. This means that
the battery life of the battery consumed node as the FFD will
be shorter than the battery consumed node as the RFD. Plug-in
node in a house can be both used as sensor node and network
coordinator. And because of sufficient energy, there is no
limitation of energy consumptions in plug-in nodes, and they
can keep out of the dormancy state, which can greatly improve
the overall response speed and efficiency of the network,
through the family of the rational use of plug-in nodes, will
greatly improve the network performance.
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978-1-4673-2101-3/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

C. Plug-in node
As nodes in WHSN, part of them can be integrated into the
household electrical appliances, to get energy from the power
cord of household appliances. For example, design of a smart
refrigerator includes temperature sensors, radio frequency
sensors and so on. Meanwhile, there is also a wireless sensor
node in the refrigerator to communicate with the home gateway
and control the works of nodes in refrigerator.
Plug-in nodes do not have the limitation of energy
consumptions, and can keep out of the sleep state. In WHSN
energy consumption directly affects the network lifetime. Use
plug-in nodes of WHSN to work as a transmitter, can reduce
energy consumption of the battery consumed nodes, thus
extending the lifetime of WHSN.
III. IMPROVING ROUTING PROTOCOLSOFWHSN
In WHSN, The routing protocols can be divided into two
categories: Planar routing protocol (such as SPIN [8] protocol
and DD [9][10] protocol etc.) and Hierarchical routing protocol
(such as LEACH [11][12] protocol etc.). In planar routing
protocols, nodes status are equal, routing generates by local
operations and feedback messages, theoretically, the
bottlenecks of planar routing protocols are exist. The
advantages of planar routing protocols are that the protocols are
simple and easy to expand. The disadvantage is that the
protocols are lank of the optimal management of
communication resources. Each node needs to know every
route to reach all of the other nodes, this makes the network
requires a lot of control information when maintaining dynamic
routings. In hierarchical routing protocols, networks are
divided into clusters. Each cluster consists of a cluster-head
and a quantity of cluster-members. Cluster-members are used
for collect and transmit data to the cluster-head, and the
cluster-head is used for fusions and forwards the data to the
upper cluster. In hierarchical routing protocols the
cluster-members do not need to maintain the routing
information. This reduces the number of the routing control
information, and increase the scalability of the network. But the
disadvantage of the hierarchical routing protocols is the energy
consumption of the cluster-head, which can be the bottleneck
of the whole network. Most of researches on routing protocols
are researches on the affect of energy consumption by routing
protocol.
The routing protocols of WSN are all based on the battery
consumed nodes, so there are some bottlenecks about the
network energy consumption. Plug-in nodes can help to solve
these problems. Because of the sufficient energy, plug-in nodes
do not have the limitation of energy consumptions, and can
work without the sleep state. It also increases the reliability and
the corresponding speed of the network. In this section,
traditional protocols in WHSN will be discussed and modified,
such as LEACH[8][9], SPIN[10] and DD[11][12].LEACH is
one of the most representatives of the hierarchical routing
protocols. In WHSN, the application of hierarchical routing
protocol to facilitate the management of WHSN devices. The
usage of LEACH is also able to balance WHSN in energy
consumption; SPIN satisfies requirements of the high
efficiency and fast convergence speed in WHSN, and applies to
mobile sensors and users; Users can easily manage the data of
the WHSN with the query based on protocol DD. By
modifying the voting, assessment, and routing algorithms, we
proposed LEACH-Pi, SPIN-Pi and DD-Pi to greatly improve
the performance, life time and response time of network, and
energy consume.
A. LEACH-Pi
Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy(LEACH) is a
low power consumption adaptive clustering routing protocol
designed for wireless sensor network. It is based on monolayer
clusters, and is a data-centric protocol.
The key idea of LAECH is: Choose the cluster-heads
regularly in each cycle, and evenly separate the energy of the
entire network load for each sensor node, which can reduce the
network energy consumption and lengthen the lifetime of the
network.
In WHSN, distribution of nodes is uneven, so it is
unrealistic that each node has the equal chance to affect the
cluster-head. Meanwhile, the WHSN has different types of
sensors; therefore, the energy consumption situation of each
node is different, which means that some nodes are not suitable
to be a cluster-head. These are the disadvantages of LEACH
protocol application in the WHSN.
By bringing the concept of plug-in nodes in the LEACH
protocol, LEACH-Pi can be described as: the cluster-head is
always acted by the plug-in node. The algorithm of network
build with LEACH-Pi is shown as follows:
Algorithm1: Network built of LEACH-Pi
1. while (the step1 for net build is not expired)
2. if (nature=plug-in)
3. statehead
4. broadcast Head_Msg
5. else
6. stateplain
7. wait for Head_Msg
8. end if
9. end while
10. while(the step2 for cluster join is not expired)
11. if(state=plain&&have heard Head_Msgs)
12. send(Join_Msg to the nearest cluster head)
13. else
14. wait(Join_Msg from its neighbor plain nodes)
15. end if
16. end while
At first, plug-in nodes broadcast massages to build the
network, and nodes decide to join the cluster according to the
sequence of the received massages, generally, nodes will select
the source node of the first received message as its cluster-head,
and inform the appropriate cluster-head to complete the process
of building cluster.
LEACH-Pi routing protocol network communication
process is shown in Figure1.
In the original LEACH protocol, the total energy
consumption of the entire network consists of three parts, the
energy consumption

of choose cluster-heads, the energy

consumption

of the communication between each node and

the cluster-heads, and the energy consumption

of the
communication between the cluster-heads and the gateway:

Figure 1. The network communication process of LEACH-Pi

(1)
InLEACH-Pi, the plug-in nodes energy value can be
regarded as infinite;hence the energy consumption of the
plug-in nodes on data sending can be regarded as 0. Therefore,
the total energy consumption of the entire network is only the
energy consumption of communication between the battery
consumed nodes and cluster-heads:

From the view of the network's total energy
consumption,the most of the energy consumption of the
LEACH protocol in the entire network are consumed at the
cluster-heads,so most of the energy consumptionshave been
reduced by using the plug-in nodes.
B. SPIN-Pi
Sensor Protocol for Information via Negotiation (SPIN) is
an adaptive data-centric communication protocol,whosegoal is
to solve the "implosion"and"overlap" in flooding by using the
consultation system and the resource adaptive mechanism
between nodes.
There are three kinds of data packets in SPIN: ADV, REQ
and DATA. The node uses the ADV to announce that it has
data to send, use the REQ to request that it expects to receive
data, and use the DATA to package data[13].When a SPIN
node obtains new data to share,itwill broadcast an ADV
message containing meta-data. If a neighbor is interested in the
data, it will send an REQ message for receivingthe DATA and
the DATA willbe sent to this neighbor node. In consequence,
the neighbor node will repeat this process to its neighbors and
the entire sensor area will get a data copy.
In WHSN, there are some data (such as the Fire alarm,
Burglar alarm) that must be ensured to be sent to the user. The
disadvantage of the SPIN protocol is: If a node's neighbors are
not forwarding data, the data will not continue to be forwarded,
so that the user couldnt receive the information.
Bybringing the concept of plug-in nodes in the SPIN
protocol,the SPIN-Pi can bedescribed as: The source node
broadcasts ADV packets to its neighbors, and after
broadcasting, only the plug-in nodes of the neighbors will
return the REQ.If the source node hasnt received any REQ in
a specified period of time after broadcasting the ADV, it will
rebroadcast ADV to its neighbors.After the neighbors have
received ADV once again, they will return the REQ in the
original way.
Thealgorithm of sources DATA transmission with
SPIN-Pi is shown as follows:
Algorithm2: DATA transmission of source in SPIN-Pi
1. do
2. send ADV
3. wait for a specified period of time
4. while(not heard REQ from neighbors)
5. send DATA
The algorithmof the neighborsDATAtransmission with
SPIN-Pi is shown as follows:
Algorithm3: DATA transmission of the neighbors in SPIN-Pi
1. if(status=first receive&&nature=plug-in||status=second receive)
2. send REQ for DATA
3. else
4. status=second receive
5. end if
SPIN-Pi routing protocol network communication process
is shown in Figure2:
Figure 2. The network communication process of SPIN-Pi
Assumingin the original SPIN routing protocol, the energy
consumption of nodeis

is for datasending, and

is
for the data receiving.The number of a nodesneighbors is n,
and the percentage of the neighbors which are fitfor the
condition is k.Then the total energy consumption of the source
node is:

The energy consumption

of receiving data of the

neighbor which is fit forthe condition is:

Then theenergy consumption

of communication
between the source node and the neighbors which are fit for the
condition is:

If the hop counts for disseminate information is Q, then the
entire energy consumption of sending the information is:

Assuming that in the SPIN-Pi,the energy consumption of
battery consumed nodeis

is for datasending, and

is for the data receiving.The number of a nodesneighbors is n,

and the percentage of theplug-in nodesin neighbors is, then
the energy consumption of communicating

between the
source node and the plug-in nodes is:

After the first time of the data broadcasting, only the
plug-in nodeswill transmit the data.So no matter how many
thehop counts for the dissemination of the information are, the
entire energy consumption for sending the information is:

Compared with the formula of the entire energy
consumption for send the information, the energy consumption
of the entire network has been significantly reduced by using
the plug-in nodes.
C. DD-Pi
Directed Diffusion (DD) is a data-centric routing
protocol.The routing is initiated to establish by the information
collection node (the gateway of the WHSN).Information
collection node broadcasts Interests packets to the WSN
periodically to tell the other nodeswhat information it wants to
collect. When an Interests packet is transmitted in the network,
the nodes which have received the data packet will create a
gradient directing at source of the Internetspacket. The value
of gradientis set by the surrounding environment of the
nodesinformation dissemination. When a node receivesan
Internetspacket,it will establish one or more path which leads
to the information collected node. DD protocol will always
take one of the best of them for transmission.
The disadvantages of the DD protocol are:
theInterestspackets need to be broadcastedby all nodes through
the entire network.So when the nodes data increase, the delay
would be great. And after the gradient has been set up, the DD
protocol will take one of the best of the paths for transmission,
which could cause the nodes on the same path will transmit
frequently, while the other nodes on the path is always in sleep
state.So the network energy consumption balance will
beenbroken[14].
Bybringingthe concept of plug-in nodes inDD protocol, the
DD-Pi can bedescribed as: After the gateway broadcasts the
Interestspacket, only plug-in nodes will broadcast the packet to
the entire network.
The algorithm of communication process with DD-Pi is
shown as follows:
Algorithm4: communication process ofDD-Pi
1. if(status=source node)
2. broadcast INTEREST_Msg
3. else
4. wait
5. if(nature=plug-in)
6. broadcast INTEREST_Msg
7. else
8. copy INTEREST_Msg only
9. end if
10. end if
DD-Pi routing protocol network communication process is
shown in Figure3:
In the original DD protocol, the processes Request diffusion
and Set up gradients are flooding processes.However in
DD-Pionly plug-in nodes will broadcast the packet. It is easy to
find that the energy consumption of the entire network has
been significantly reduced by using the plug-innodes.
Simultaneously, using fewer nodes forbroadcasting the
messages will improves the response speed of the network.
Figure 3. The network communication process of DD-Pi
D. Summarize
The plug-in nodes have sufficient energy that they are
always in working condition, but in order to reduce energy
consumption, the battery consumed nodes need a long time for
sleep state. From this perspective, plug-in nodes can reduce the
information transmission time and improve the transmission
quality.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
A. Simulation scene
In different situations, the information contents of network
are different. LEACH protocol can well handle the situation
that a large number of nodes in the network to send data out.
SPIN and DD protocol is applicable to the case of a relatively
small amount of data. In the simulations, different parameters
for different types of protocols are to ensure the authenticity of
the results.
To ensure the authenticity of the results, we set different
parameters for different types of protocols in the
simulations.Andwe define an area with 20*20 sq.m., place 90
battery consumed nodes into the area randomly, and 10 plug-in
nodes regularly.
B. Simulation results
We evaluate the performance of the improved routing
protocol by the lifetime of the network.
Figure 4 is the time chart for thenetworks lifetime. In the
simulation of LEACH, all the cluster-members have to send
messages in every round. And in thesimulation of SPIN and
DD, wedefine that there are 10 nodes generated data sent to the
gatewayrandomly in each round.
As shown in Figure4(a), the network lifetime of the
LEACH-Pi is longer than that of the LEACH. It isobvious that
at about 1600 round, thebattery consumed nodes in LEACH-Pi
begins to die, while the battery consumed nodes in LEACH
have completely all died. That means the improved routing
protocol has extended the network lifetime greatly.
Similarly, as shown in Figure4(b), the network lifetime of
the SPIN-Pi is longer than that of the SPIN. The figure shows
that when the battery consumed nodes of the SPIN-Pi began to
die, the battery consumed nodes of the SPIN were virtually all

died.In Figure 4(c), which is the time chart for thenetwork

lifetime,the network lifetime of the DD-Pi is more than twice
of the DDs.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we havediscussed and modifiedLEACH,
SPIN, and DD protocol which are based on the WHSN, and
wehave used the plug-in nodes to improve them to put forward
the LEACH-Pi, SPIN-Pi, and DD-Pi protocols.With the
comparison of the original protocol and the improved protocol,
we have explained the advantages of the plug-in nodes in
reducing energy consumption of the entire network.
In future researches, we will continue to devote ourselves to
the advantages of the plug-in nodes in reducing energy
consumption, and improve other WHSN routing protocol by
using the plug-in nodes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research has been sponsored in part by National
Natural Science Foundation of China No. 60905042 and No.
60950110354, and Huawei Technology Foundation No.
YBNW2010086.
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(a) LEACH-Pi & LEACH (b)SPIN-Pi &SPIN (c)DD-Pi & DD
Figure 4. Contrast improved protocols with original protocols