Networked Wireless Sensor Data Collection: Issues, Challenges, and Approaches

Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been applied to many applications, One of the most important applications is Sensor Data Collections, where sensed data are collected at all or some of the sensor nodes and forwarded to a central base station for further processing. Special features of sensor data collection in WSNs Issues and prior solutions on the utilizations of WSNs for sensor data collection. Propose to break down the networked wireless sensor data collection into three major stages: o deployment stage, o control message dissemination stage o data delivery stage.

Introduction
New challenges : - The consideration of energy efficiency - The wireless losses and collisions during sensor nodes communicate with each other. Issues that need to be considered in the network design: - sensors may be required to be put at specific locations (to acquire data accurately) - Different types of data (temperature, light, vibration) with different sampling rates. - No information loss in data delivery : No data aggregation/fusion operations Unbalanced energy consumptions over a WSN(shorten the network lifetime ) A survey on recent advances: - Comparing data collection in wired sensor networks and WSN special features. Discuss issues and prior solutions. Discuss different approaches for control message dissemination.

II. OVERVIEW
A. Wireless Sensor Networks
High efficient energy utilization is necessary (unlike wired technologies: Internet as well as wireless mesh and mobile ad hoc network). Sensor network is expected to: - Have nodes that work through a long time, but not to work all the time - support fault tolerance (location covered by several sensor nodes ) - Avoid duplicate sensing, while one node is performing the sensing processingtransmitting cycle, other nodes are kept in the idle state. o idle nodes turn to dormant state o next cycle (internal timer) : waken up back to normal (active) state o Duty-cycle = active period / (active +dormant) period Lower duty-cycle: longer life time for operation - Have nodes with adjustable transmission range or dynamically adjusted for better performance and low energy consumption.

B. Sensor Data Collection

The Choice of wireless instead of wired sensor network in many cases and its advantages in the sensor data collection: - great efforts for deployment and maintenance of the wired sensor network - Hard to find out and replace the broken line. - The environment has an impact (harshness , rodent for normal habitations, ...) But data collection in WSNs is not in mature stage and its special features call for novel approaches and solutions different from other applications: - Target tracking : asynchronous data collection - No data aggregation and fusion technique Many-to-one traffic pattern energy hole problem (sensors close to the base station are depleted quickly due to traffic relays) o As a solution mobile entities move around and collect data in the sensing field. But in harsh environment this could be unfeasible Sensor used in sensor data collection are in great amount and in different types different transmission rate aggravate the traffic pattern unbalance and the energy consumption

C. Taxonomy
The networked wireless sensor data collection is divided into three major stages:
a. deployment stage, i. area coverage : some sensor nodes to cover an area ii. Location coverage : nodes attached to some locations specified by the applications control message dissemination stage i. flooding based ii. gossiping based data delivery stage i. QoS requirement: Reliability, Latency, Throughput, Energy Consumption.

b. c.

III. DEPLOYMENT STRATEGIES

A. Deployment for Area-Coverage
Area coverage requirement: at least k (k 1) sensor nodes Solutions : - Random deployment (by spraying from plane or scattering by hand) : practical but not optimized - Optimization : k-coverage requirement : How many sensors? o = n/ ||R|| where is the density , n total number of sensors, ||R|| the sensing field area o In a sub-region A: the node number follows a Poisson distribution with the average as A. o Lets the function : k(x) = 1, if at most k 1 nodes cover point x; k(x) = 0, otherwise. P(k(x) = 1) = e Vk= o ( )
-

( )

(1) , (2): the region covered by at most k-1 nodes.

we need to find a suitable density that lets P(Vk = 0) 1 as l +.

 = log l2 +(k +1) log log l2 +c(l)

o

, with c(l) + as l +. (3)

To consider boundary effects, the authors divide the sensing field into small grids with equal side length, which are further categorized into inner grids, side grids and corner grids based on their distances to the borders of the sensing field. (4), where p is the probability that a sensor node is in

p = log l2 + 2k log log l2 + c(l)

active state.

Manual deployment reduces equipment costs o o Connectivity is as important as coverage requirement: 2 parameters are considered: o Rc : communication range o Rs : sensing range Proposed patterns to reduce the number of sensor nodes : o strip-based deployment pattern (horizontal line) for 1- connectivity o vertical line was added to strip-based deployment pattern to support 1- connectivity o diamond pattern for 4- connectivity o The optimal deployment patterns for full coverage and k-connectivity with k 6 was finally completed The network is divided to 3 parts based in the distance from base station : o Inner part : close to the base station : sensing and relay traffic o Medium part o Outer part

Possible solution is to further divide the medium part into sub-parts to enable a finer approach with different density for each sub-parts.

B. Deployment for Location-Coverage

IV. DATA DELIVERY APPROACHES

V. CONTROL MESSAGE DISSEMINATIONS

VI. CONCLUSION