Department of Electronic Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Korea.
Department of Smart Systems Software, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Korea.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Jan 11;19(2):272. doi: 10.3390/s19020272.
By utilizing mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), WSNs can be deployed in more challenging environments that cannot connect with the Internet, such as those that are isolated or dangerous, and can also achieve a balanced energy consumption among sensors which leads to prolonging the network lifetime. However, an additional overhead is required to check the current location of the sink in order for a node to transmit data to the mobile sink, and the size of the overhead is proportional to that of the network. Meanwhile, WSNs composed of solar-powered nodes have recently been actively studied for the perpetual operation of a network. This study addresses both of these research topics simultaneously, and proposes a method to support an efficient location service for a mobile sink utilizing the surplus energy of a solar-powered WSN. In this scheme, nodes that have a sufficient energy budget can constitute rings, and the nodes belonging to these rings (which are called ring nodes) maintain up-to-date location information on the mobile sink node and serve this information to the other sensor nodes. Because each ring node only uses surplus energy to serve location information, this does not affect the performance of a node's general operations (e.g., sensing, processing, and data delivery). Moreover, because multiple rings can exist simultaneously in the proposed scheme, the overhead for acquiring the position information of the sink can be significantly reduced, and also hardly increases even if the network size becomes larger.
通过在无线传感器网络 (WSN) 中使用移动汇聚节点，WSN 可以部署在无法连接互联网的更具挑战性的环境中，例如那些孤立或危险的环境，并且还可以实现传感器之间的能耗平衡，从而延长网络寿命。然而，为了让节点将数据传输到移动汇聚节点，需要额外的开销来检查汇聚节点的当前位置，并且开销的大小与网络的大小成正比。同时，最近已经积极研究了由太阳能供电的节点组成的 WSN，以实现网络的永久运行。本研究同时解决了这两个研究课题，并提出了一种利用太阳能 WSN 的剩余能量为移动汇聚节点提供高效位置服务的方法。在该方案中，具有足够能量预算的节点可以构成环，属于这些环的节点（称为环节点）维护移动汇聚节点的最新位置信息，并将该信息提供给其他传感器节点。因为每个环节点仅使用剩余能量来提供位置信息，所以这不会影响节点的一般操作（例如，感测、处理和数据传输）的性能。此外，由于在提出的方案中可以同时存在多个环，因此可以显著减少获取汇聚节点位置信息的开销，并且即使网络规模变大，开销也几乎不会增加。
