ALCOMFT-TR-03-162

Sotiris Nikoletseas, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Athanasios Antoniou, Haris Euthimiou, Athanasios Kinalis and George Mylonas
Energy Efficient Protocols for Sensing Multiple Events in Smart Dust Networks
Patras. Work packages 2 and 5. December 2003.

Abstract: Smart Dust is comprised of a vast number of ultra-small fully autonomous computing and communication devices, with very restricted energy and computing capabilities, that co-operate to accomplish a large sensing task. Smart Dust can be very useful in practice i.e. in the local detection of remote crucial events and the propagation of data reporting their realization to a control center.

In this work: a) We propose extended versions of two data propagation protocols: the Sleep-Awake Probabilistic Forwarding Protocol (SW-PFR) and the Hierarchical Threshold sensitive Energy Efficient Network protocol (H-TEEN). These non-trivial extensions aim at improving the performance of the original protocols, by introducing sleep-awake periods in the PFR case to save energy, and introducing a hierarchy of clustering in the TEEN case to better cope with large networks areas, b) We have implemented the two protocols and performed an extensive experimental comparison of various important measures of their performance with a focus on energy consumption, c) We investigate in detail the relative advantages and disadvantages of each protocol and discuss and explain their behavior, d) In the light above we propose and discuss a possible hybrid combination of the two protocols towards optimizing certain goals.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-03-162.ps.gz (342 kb).