Cellular self-organization architecture for wireless
sensor networks
M.Asim, H.Mokhtar, and M.Merabti
School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Liverpool John Moores University
M.Asim@2006.ljmu.ac.uk , H.M.Mokhtar@ljmu.ac.uk, M.Merabti@ljmu.ac.uk
Abstract - Wireless sensor networks are composed of large
number of sensor nodes, which are limited in resources i.e.
memory, energy and computation power. Sensor network life
time is directly related to nodes energy. Wireless sensor networks
are expected to be capable of self-organization in an efficient,
reliable and continues manner during the life time of the
network. Self-organization of wireless sensor networks are
usually involved in partitioning the network into connected
groups or clusters and is challenging task because of limited
bandwidth and energy resources available in these networks. In
this paper we propose a new cellular self-organized architecture
for wireless sensor networks that extends the network life by
efficiently utilizing nodes energy and distribute management
tasks to support the scalability of management system in a
densely deployed sensor networks. In our solution the network is
partitioned into a virtual grid of cells. A cell manager and a
gateway node are chosen in each cell to perform management
tasks. Cell manager and gateway nodes coordinate with each
other to perform management with minimum energy
consumption. We assume a homogenous network where all nodes
are equal in resources.
I. INTRODUCTION
Recent developments in wireless communication and
electronics have made possible the development of small,
inexpensive, low power, distributive devices. These devices
are capable of local processing and wireless communication
and are known as sensor nodes. Thus a sensor network can be
described as a collection of sensor nodes which co-ordinate to
perform some specific function. A sensor network ensures a
wide range of application. Examples includes environmental
monitoring- which involves monitoring air soil and water,
condition based maintenance, habitat monitoring, seismic
detection, military surveillance, inventory tracking, smart
spaces etc.
These sensor nodes are mainly in large numbers and are
densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close
to it. Also the position of sensor nodes not needs to be
engineered or predetermine, which allows random deployment
in inaccessible terrains or disaster relief operations. Another
unique feature of sensor networks is the on board processing
and co-ordination. Instead of sending the raw data to the
nodes responsible for fusion, they use their processing abilities
to carry out simple computation and transmit only the required
and partially processed data. On the other hand, this also
means that sensor networks protocols and algorithms must
possess self-organizing capabilities. Self-organization is the
process of autonomous formation of connectivity, addressing
and routing structures. Self organization in wireless sensor
networks is a significant research topic. A self organized
wireless node can be clustered or grouped into an easily
manageable network [1-6].
One of the crucial design challenges in wireless sensor
network is energy efficiency. Since sensor nodes are operated
on battery and keeping the nodes active all the time will limit
the duration that battery last. Also, individual sensor nodes use
a small battery as a power source and replacing or recharging
of these batteries in remote locations are not practical. In some
cases solar cells are also use as a source of energy but they
provide limited power. Therefore, it is very important to tackle
energy efficiently at all levels of sensor network infrastructure.
Wireless radio is the major energy consumer in a sensor node
and systematic management of network communication
become critical. Network communication is involved in tasks
like routing, gathering or forwarding sensing information to a
nearby data sink or a remote base station. In order to achieve
effective coordination among these activities, it is important to
address the problems of sensor network organization and the
subsequent reorganization and maintenance [7]. One of the
research challenges for succeeding the vision of a self
organized wireless sensor network is the scalability of
management system. A sensor network may consist of
hundreds, thousands, or even millions of inexpensive wireless
sensor nodes that may be placed either regularly or irregularly.
This is mainly concern network traffic and response delay as
the result of self-managed maintenance upon resource-
constrained WSNs. Distribution of management tasks in
sensor nodes is an energy efficient approach and utilizes node
resources effectively in a large scale WSN [8]. Therefore,
Sensor nodes will take more management responsibilities and
decision making in order to achieve a self managed network.
This study present a new cellular self-organization
architecture for wireless sensor networks that extends the
network life by efficiently utilizing nodes energy and
distribute management tasks to support the scalability of
management system in a densely deployed sensor networks. In
our scheme, the whole network is divided into a virtual grid
where each cell consists of a group of nodes. A cell manager
and a gateway node are chosen in each cell to perform
management tasks. These cells combine to form various
groups and each group promote one of their cell managers to a
group manager. A group of cells are than managed by their
group manager. In our scheme, both cell manager and gateway
node mutually co-ordinate with each other to perform
management tasks. We assume a homogenous network where
all nodes are equal in resources. We considered energy-
efficiency and scalability of management systems as primary
challenges in succeeding the vision of self-organized WSNs.
Our architecture can be considered as a special kind of
clustering architectures. However, it is more systematic, more
robust and more scalable.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 3 provides a
brief review of related work in the literature. In section 4, we
define the architecture model of our proposed solution;
Section 5 describes the management process; Section 6
discusses our architecture by highlighting a few significant
features.
II. RELATED WORK
Self organization (or self configuration) has been a
significant research topic in wireless networks. Self
organization involves abstracting the communicating entities
into an easily controllable network infrastructure. Clustered or
connected dominating set (CDS), grid, tree, or mesh based
organization are key terms in self organization. A self-
organized wireless node can be grouped or clustered into an
easily manageable network infrastructure [7]. Clustering has
been used to address various issues i.e. routing, energy
efficiency, management and huge-scale control. Therefore
clustering can be formed in several ways. Nodes generally
form a cluster in two stages: (1) a header is selected among the
nodes through election algorithm, randomized election, degree
of connectivity or pre-definition, and (2) the headers and the
nodes interact to form a group or a cluster [11]. Clustering is
an efficient approach for building scalable and energy-
balanced applications. The scheme proposed in [12] is based
on cluster formation. It divided the network into different
clusters and a cluster head is appointed for each cluster. A
cluster head has more resources than other cluster members.
This cluster head perform major tasks and management
operations. The data can only be transmitted to other clusters
through cluster heads. Failure of a cluster head limits
accessibility to the nodes under its supervision. Load balance
clustering has been proposed to balance the load on cluster
heads [13]. It deploys some less energy constrained nodes
(called gateway) as cluster headers. This approach may not
generate the shortest communication route. The wireless link
between the header and the member nodes is asymmetric. In
this scheme the header can reach the member nodes but the
member nodes cannot necessarily reach the reply link. It
verifies the problem of the density of clusters but does not
show how to determine the ratio of headers to member nodes
[11]. The architecture proposed in [15] is based on
hierarchical management of sensor nodes. This study presents
an algorithm for self-organization mechanism of high-level
nodes, contesting member nodes by multi-hop to form
hierarchical clusters, and applying the ‘20/80 rule’ to
determine the ratio of headers to member nodes. MANNA
[19] is a policy based self managed architecture for wireless
sensor networks that collects dynamic management
information, map this into WSN models, and execute
management functions and services based on WSN model.
Thus, network can manage them with out human intervention.
Management functions in MANNA represent the lowest
granularity functional of a management service. A function
can be shared by different services. MANNA is based on an
agent based model that distributes the functionality in the
hierarchical network management. in this way, energy
efficiency and increased accuracy of management decision can
be achieved. In this architecture, sensor nodes maintain their
management role through out the network life time. However,
this type of static approach is impractical in a highly dynamic
sensor network [20]. Our proposed architecture enables
sensor nodes to autonomously reconfigure their management
role according to node real time capability such as energy.
III. PROPOSED MECHANISM
In this section we present our new cellular self-organized
architecture for WSNs and an overall working flow of the
system.
A. Cellular architecture
In this architecture we divide the network into a virtual grid
of cells. A cell can be considered as a special kind of
clustering. However it is more systematic and scalable. Cells
can merge together to produce large cells that would be
managed using the same process. We extended the
architecture proposed in [14]. In our proposed solution the
whole network is divided into a virtual grid using some type of
virtual coordinate system. We consider sensor networks
where each sensor node is aware of its own location. The
network can use location services such as [16] and [17] to
estimate the locations of the individual nodes, and no GPS
receiver is required at each node.
Fig. 1. Sensor nodes
For example, Figure 1 overlays virtual cells on Figure 2,
creating three virtual cells A, B, and C. according to our
definition of virtual grid, nodes in Cell A can communicate
with all the nodes in Cell B and nodes in Cell B can reach all
the nodes in Cell C.
Fig. 2. Division of the network into a virtual grid
After the division of the network into small virtual cells as
shown in figure 2, a cell manager is appointed in each cell.
The cell manager then selects a gateway node and decides
which common node will perform sensing and which will go
to sleep. Cell manager receive updates from its cell member
on regular basis. Both cell manager and gateway node
mutually coordinate to perform management tasks.
B. Distributed cell formation
In order to elect cell managers and gateway nodes, any node
can send a discovery message that consist of its node ID, Cell
ID, and energy level and only nodes with higher energy would
respond. The combination of Cell manager with gateway node
guarantees a connected network.
1) Cell manager selection
The node with the highest life time or energy will be
appointed as a cell manager. Cell manager keep changing in
each cell in order to extend network life time.
2) Gateway node selection
Cell manager will select the gateway node on the basis of
Maximum energy. Communication between cells takes place
through gateway nodes. The cell manager broadcast a message
to its cell members which in return send their updates
including their node ID and energy level. Upon receiving
updates from cell members, the cell manager appoints a
gateway node. Both cell manager and gateway node stores
node ID’s of their cell members.
3) Group manager selection
After the selection of cell managers and gateway nodes, cells
combine to form various virtual groups. Each group of cells
then selects a group manager with mutual co ordination. A
group manager is a cell manager which performs its normal
tasks for its own cell but at the same time act as a group
manager for a group of cells. This is shown in figure 3.
Fig. 3. Virtual cells in the form of a grid
Cells 1,2,4,5 combine to form a group and with mutual co
ordination they promote cell 9 cell manager to a group
manager. Cell 5 manager will now perform two roles; one as a
cell manager to perform management tasks for its own cell
and second as a group manager for a group of cells. The main
goal of introducing this group manager is to perform high
level management tasks and predict future faults. The
selection of group manager is based on the available energy
and it keeps changing in the group to balance the energy. Each
cell maintains its health status in terms of energy. It can be
High, Medium or Low. These health statuses are then sent out
to there associate group managers. Upon receiving these
health statuses, group manager predict and avoid future faults
IV. OUR SELF-ORGANIZED ALGORITHM
In this section, we describe our proposed algorithm which
helps in self-organizing a set of sensor nodes, randomly
scattered in an area. The algorithm consists of four phases and
performs the following operation in the order they are
mentioned.
A. Discovery phase
In discovery phase, each node turns on its radio and
exchange discovery messages to find other nodes within the
same cell. This discovery message is the combination of node
id, cell id and node state. A node uses its location and size of
the grid to determine the cell id.
B. Organizational phase
During this phase the network is organized and performs
the following operations:
1) Nodes organized themselves into cells and cell
combines to form virtual groups.
2) Each node is allocated with an address i.e.
combination of node id and cell id.
3) The node with lowest coordinates starts acting as a
cell manager. This is a criteria to select the cell
manager for the first time in each cell.
4) All cell members send there updates to the cell
manager, which in return appoint a gateway node for
its region.
5) Cell manager also decide which node will perform
sensing and will go to low computational mode to
conserve energy.
6) Gateway node is responsible for routing information
to other gateway nodes.
7) A group of cells can form a bigger cell to perform
high level management task. A group manager is
required for each group of cells and this can be
achieved by promoting any cell manager in a group
to a group manager.
C. Maintenance phase
In the maintenance phase the following operations are
performed.
1) In active monitoring, every node keeps track of its
energy level and sends regular updates to there cell
managers. This is called in-cycle updates
2) Each cell manager aggregates its cell energy and
sends to its group manager. This is less frequent than
in-cycle update and called health cycle updates. This
is to identify those cells, which no longer can
participate in network operation due to insufficient
energy.
D. Self-organization phase
In this phase a cell manager send a low energy node
to sleep before it completely shut down. Cell
manager ask common nodes and gateway nodes on
regular bases to send there updates. If the cell
manager does not receive an update from any node
then it send an instant message to the node and
acquire about its status. If cell manager does not
receive the acknowledgement in a given time then
declare it as a faulty node and pass this information
to the rest of the network. The gateway node is like
another common node and sends updates regularly to
its cell manager. If the gateway node is low in energy
then cell manager appoint another node to act as a
gate way node and send the existence gateway node
to low computational mode or sleeping mode. The
gateway node can also be detected as faulty, if the
cell manager does not hear from it during updates
cycle. Also, a cell manager can be replaced by any
other cell member as if it is low in energy. Each cell
manager sends its health status information to its
group manager through gateway nodes. This is less
frequent than in-cell update cycle. If group manager
doesn’t receive health status from a particular cell
then it waits for the second health status update. If a
group manager doesn’t receive the health status
updates during the second update cycle then it
informs the whole network about the occurrence of a
faulty cell. A group manager can be replaced by
another cell manager in case of a fault or energy
reason.
V. MANAGEMENT PROCESS
In most centralized management systems the base station
acts as a central manager and controls the entire network. It
collects information from all nodes and performs complex
management tasks. The central station becomes a single point
of data traffic for processing all the messages and making
management decisions. But, this approach incurs a high
message overhead (bandwidth and energy) from data polling,
and this consequently limit network scalability. Some
proposed solutions shows that as the central manager have the
global knowledge of the network; it can provide accurate
management decision [9]. However, we believe that this cause
network traffic overhead and limit network scalability,
especially in large-scale sensor networks. Therefore, localized
decision in certain degree reduces the network traffic overhead
and has a quicker response to events that occurs in the
network.
Our proposed solution is based on homogeneous paradigm,
where all nodes are equal in resources. Common nodes
periodically send out their status (i.e. current energy levels)
only on request from cell managers. Both cell manager and
gateway node perform management task with mutual co-
ordination. They are responsible for the members of their own
cell. The main emphasize is to perform management functions
locally. Both cell manager and gateway node are at the same
management level. Cell manager and gateway nodes can be
replaced by common nodes in case of backup and recovery.
Another layer of management comprises of group managers,
which are responsible for operation like detecting faulty cells
and predict future faults.
VI. DISCUSSION
Energy-efficiency is an important research challenge to
succeed the vision of a self organized wireless sensor network.
Our approach addresses this challenge by employing a load
balancing strategy so that all nodes remain up and running
together for as long as possible. Therefore, we consider that all
the nodes in the network are equal in resources and no node
should be more resourceful than any other node. The optimal
role assignment and reconfiguration scheme support the
network management system to utilize the network nodes in
the most efficient manner. Our approach does not rely on
specific nodes with extra resources but assign tasks due to
there optimal capabilities. Nodes are ranked according to their
available energy. Therefore, the selection of the gateway node
and a cell manager is based on the available energy. The basis
idea of this design is to encourage nodes to be more self-
manageable and extend the network life time for as long as
possible. In centralized approaches, information flow is
towards a single point, which limits the scalability of the
network and cause traffic overhead. Therefore, the more local
decision a node can make, the less information is required to
be delivered to the central manager or base station. The
proposed architecture efficiently distributes management tasks
across the virtual grid to reduce the valuable network traffic
and node energy.
Fault tolerance is the ability to maintain sensor networks
functionalities without any interruption due to sensor nodes
failure. Sensor node may fail due to lack of energy,
communication problem, physical damage or interference
from environment. The network should be able to identify
faults and organize itself to reconfigure and recover from
failure without losing any information [18]. The proposed
architecture performs fault detection and recovery locally with
minimum energy consumption. Both cell manager and
gateway node detect faulty node through mutual coordination.
If the cell manager does not receive an update from any node
then it send an instant message to the node and acquire about
its status. If cell manager does not receive the
acknowledgement in a given time then declare it as a faulty
node and pass this information to the rest of the network.
Specifically, the grid based architecture permits the
implementation of fault detection in a distributed manner and
allows the failure report to be forwarded across cells.
It is a simple grid base architecture which supports
lightweight operations. The main idea to propose a model that
doesn’t consume much energy or memory. It is based upon the
virtual coordination due to which cells are built automatically
and there is no need to exchange too much messages to build
the clusters. The cell member remains on the same cell
regardless of the cell manager. The cellular architecture is for
management purpose only so they can be merged into clusters
for routing or any other purpose if needed.
VII. CONCLUSION
WSN has presented various research challenges and one
major challenge is to design an efficient self-organized
architecture of wireless sensor network. In this paper we
described a new cellular self-organized architecture for
wireless sensor networks. We divide the whole network into a
virtual grid, where each cell comprises of a group of nodes.
Decomposition of the network in to a virtual grid supports the
distribution of management tasks to scale the management
system in a densely deployed sensor network. Unlike
centralized system, traffic is not directed toward the single
point and this conserve valuable network traffic and energy.
By employing nodes with equal resources adopt the load
balancing strategy which enables the nodes to remain up and
running for as long as possible. This extends network life time
and encourages network nodes to be more self-manageable.
REFERENCES
[1] A. Bharathidasas, and V. Anand, “Sensor networks:
An overview”, Technical report, Dept. of Computer
Science, University of California at Davis, 2002
[2] D. Estrin, R. Govindan, J. Heidemann, and S. Kumar,
"Next century challenges: Scalable coordination in
sensor networks", in Proceedings of ACM Mobicom,
Seattle, Washington, USA, August 1999, pp. 263--
270, ACM.
[3] I.F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam and E.
Cayirci, "A Survey on Sensor Networks", IEEE
Communications Magazine, pp. 102--114, August
2002.
[4] D. Estrin, L. Girod, G. Pottie, M. Srivastava,
“Instrumenting the world with wireless sensor
networks”, In Proceedings of the International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal
Processing (ICASSP 2001.
[5] E. S. Biagioni and G. Sasaki, “Wireless sensor
placement for reliable and efficient data collection”,
in the 36th International Conference on Systems
Sciences, Hawaii, January 2003.
[6] R. Krishnan and D. Starobinski, “Efficient clustering
algorithms for self-organizing wireless sensor
networks”, Ad Hoc Networks, 2005. In print.
[7] M. Kochhal, L. Schwiebert, and S. Gupta, “Role-
based hierarchical self organization for wireless ad
hoc sensor networks”, In Proc. of the 2nd ACM Intl.
Conf. on Wireless Sensor Networks and Appl., pages
98--107, 2003.
[8] M. Yu, H. Mokhtar, M. Merabti, “A survey of
network management architecture in wireless sensor
network”, in: Proceedings of the Sixth Annual
PostGraduate Symposium on The Convergence of
Telecommunications, Networking and Broadcasting,
2006.
[9] W. L. Lee, A. Datta, and R. Cardell-Oliver, “Network
Management in Wireless Sensor Networks”, to
appear in Handbook on Mobile Ad Hoc and
Pervasive Communications, edited by M. K. Denko
and L. T. Yang, American Scientific Publishers.
[10] M. Younis, M. Youssef and K. Arisha, "Energy-
Aware Routing in Cluster-Based Sensor Networks,"
Proceedings of the 10th IEEE/ACM International
Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of
Computer and Telecommunication Systems
(MASCOTS2002.
[11] J.L Chen , H.F Lu and C.A Lee, “Autonomic self-
organization architecture for wireless sensor
communications”, International Journal of Network
Management, v.17 n.3, p.197-208, June 2007.
[12] A. T. Tai, K.S.T., William H. Sanders, “Cluster-
Based Failure Detection Service for Large-Scale Ad
Hoc Wireless Network Applications in Dependable
Systems and Networks”, DSN ' 04. 2004.
[13] G. Gupta and M. Younis, “Load-Balanced Clustering
in Wireless Sensor Networks”, in the Proceedings of
International Conference on Communication (ICC
2003), Anchorage, AK, May 2003.
[14] Y. Xu, J. Heidemann, and D. Estrin, “Geography-
informed energy conservation for ad hoc routing”, In
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International
Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking,
pages 70--84, Rome, Italy, July 2001.
[15] C.-A. Lee, Y.-C. Chang, and J.-L. Chen, "Intelligent
self-organization management mechanism for
wireless sensor networks," Proc. 6th International
Conference on Wireless Communications, pp.47–54,
July 2004.
[16] A. Savvides, C. Han, and M. Strivastava, “Dynamic
finegrained localization in ad-hoc networks of
sensors”, In Proc. Of ACM MOBICOM’01, pg 166–
179. ACM Press, 2001.
[17] L. Doherty, L. El Ghaoui, and K. S. J. Pister,
“Convex position estimation in wireless sensor
networks”, In Proc. Of IEEE INFOCOM 2001,
Anchorage, AK, April 2001.
[18] L. B. Ruiz, I. G.Siqueira, L. B. Oliveira, H. C. Wong,
J.M. S. Nogueira, and A. A. F. Loureiro. “Fault
management in event-driven wireless sensor
networks”, MSWiM’04, October 4-6, 2004, Venezia,
Italy
[19] L. B. Ruiz, J. M. S. Nogueira, and A. A. Loureiro,
“MANNA: A management architecture for wireless
sensor networks,” IEEE Communications
Magazine,41(2):116{125, Feb 2003.
[20] M. Yu, H. Mokhtar, M. Merabti, “A self-organized
middleware architecture for wireless sensor
networks”, Int. J. Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous
Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2008