Novel Technique for Efficient power management in Wireless Sensor

Networks

Synopsis of the Proposed Research Plan

Submitted for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering Science

Of

Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum

By

G. Srinivasalu

Under the Supervision of

Dr. UMADEVI. H

Associate Professor, Dept of Electronics and Communication Engineering

Dr Ambedkar Institute of Technology

Bangalore- 560056
 SYNOPSIS

Title: Novel Technique for efficient power management in Wireless Sensor

Networks

Name of the Candidate : G. SRINIVASALU

Name of the Guide : Dr. UMADEVI. H

Introduction:
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can be defined as a network of nodes that cooperatively
sense and may manipulate the environment thus modifying the interaction between person or
computers and the environment. Each sensor network node usually comprises of a radio
transceiver along with an antenna, a microcontroller, an electronic circuit for computing with the
sensors and an energy source, mainly a battery. The wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of
spatially distributed self-dependent sensors to track on physical or environmental conditions such
as temperature, pressure, sound, humidity, wind speed and direction, pollution levels and
combining this data and forwarded via multiple hops to a main target location that can use it
locally or is connected to other networks through a gateway. WSN is made up of nodes varying
from a few to several hundreds or even thousands, where each node is connected to one or more
sensors [1]. The nodes mainly use a broadcast communication and the network topology can
change constantly due, for example, to the fact that nodes are prone to fail. Because of this, we
should keep in mind that nodes should be autonomous and, frequently, they will be disregarded.
This kind of device has limited power, low computational capabilities and limited memory. One
of the main issues that should be studied in WSNs is their scalability feature [2], their connection
strategy for communication [3] and the limited energy to supply the device.

The desire to advance in research and development of WSN was initially motivated by
military applications such as surveillance of threats on the battlefield, mainly because WSN can
replace single high-cost sensor assets with large arrays of distributed sensors. There are other
interesting fields like home control, building automation and medical applications. A number of
hospitals and medical centers are exploring the use of WSN technology in a wide range of
applications, including pre-hospital and in-hospital patient monitoring and rehabilitation and
disaster response. WSNs can also be found in environmental monitoring applications such as
marine fish farms [4] and fire detection in forest and rural areas [5]. Sensor nodes in WSNs are
usually battery powered but nodes are typically unattended because of their deployment in
hazardous, hostile or remote environments. A number of power saving techniques must be used
both in the design of electronic transceiver circuits and in network protocols.

One of the major causes of energy loss in the WSN node is the idle mode consumption,
when the node is not transmitting/receiving any information but listening and waiting for
information from other nodes. There is also an energy loss due to packet collision, as all packets
involved in the collision are discarded and must be retransmitted. A third cause of energy loss is
the reception of packets not addressed to the node. The fourth major source of wasted energy is
the transmission –and possible retransmission- of control packets, as these can be seen as
protocol overhead. There are several studies that present different aspects related to power saving
techniques, but all of them are focused in a single way to improve the energy consumption and
save power in WSNs.

Review of literature:
The power management schemes of wireless sensor networks have attracted high attention in
recent years. Much published research has addressed all kinds of issues related to them. We can
find several works related to energy conservation techniques. They tend to focus on comparative
routing protocols or MAC-protocols. Some of them show techniques related to the operation
mode of the nodes and its radio system. In this section we will see some of these works, and we
will provide some of the key conclusions presented in these papers. In [6], G.P. Halkes et al.
compared S-MAC and TMAC, which try to save energy by introducing a duty cycle to mitigate
idle listening time, with CSMA/CA. This choice was taken because it is the most important
cause of energy in typical sensor network scenarios where the communications between nodes is
not continuous. They show the effects of low-power listening, a physical layer optimization, in
combination with these MAC protocols. The results show that using a low-power listening is
very effective at mitigating idle listening. The absolute lowest energy consumption is reached in
combination with T-MAC, while the results about S-MAC show that this protocol suffers from
over provisioning. Since its duty cycle is fixed for all nodes, often a rather large value must be
selected to avoid dropping messages under peak loads, which causes SMAC’s idle-listening to
deteriorate for increasing traffic loads. Although S-MAC achieves acceptable results, they are
not as good as those of T-MAC with low-power listening. T-MAC presents an aggressive time-
out policy that allows it to adapt seamlessly to variations in traffic induced by typical sensor
network applications at the expense of a reduction in peak throughput. T-MAC performs slightly
better for variations over time (events) than for variations in location.

V. Raghunathan et al. [7] review several techniques to address the energy consumption
challenge. This work also describes recent advances in energy-aware platforms for information
processing and communication protocols for sensor collaboration. The article looks at emerging
and hitherto largely unexplored techniques such as the use of environmental energy harvesting
and the optimization of the energy consumed during sensing. The paper presents some promising
research directions for alleviating the energy problem in WSNs, including hierarchical
architectures, ultra-low-power MAC protocols, environmental energy harvesting, and energy
aware sensing. The authors explain and present an architecture of sensor node in order to be
considered energy efficient. At the same time, they present a wireless sensor module, a
heliomote, which is used in different tests in order to show that it is possible to provide energy to
the nodes from alternative sources instead of from a battery, which has a limited life time. They
also compare three MAC protocols. These are B-MAC, STEM-T, and WiseMAC, which are
characterized by low power consumption in the media access process.

Another significant work is presented by N. A. Pantazis et al. in [8]. The authors focus their
explanations on the fundamental concepts of energy management, including the need of power
management in the wireless sensor network, and discuss the side effects of power management
in terms of cost. They say that the cost of power management must always be borne in mind
when speaking about a power control system. The cost of power management is important for
evaluating the performance of a power control system, no matter what the specific objectives
may be. Throughout the document, they describe different types of power management systems
and different approaches and goals they may have. The authors divide the power conservation
mechanisms into two main categories based on their primary objectives. On the one hand,
Passive PCMs are divided into three sub-categories: Physical Layer, Fine-Grain, and Coarse-
Grain PCMs. In the implementation of the Coarse-Grain PCMs, two basic approaches were
distinguished: Distributed and Backbone-based. On the other hand, the classification of the
Active PCMs is based on the layer (MAC, Network, and Transport). Various algorithms were
studied for each classification. Each power management scheme is discussed in terms of
objective, mechanism, performance, and application scenario. The similarities and differences
between schemes of the same clustering category are also presented. The authors conclude the
paper by stating that although the presented power management schemes is promising, further
research would be necessary to address other issues, such as quality of service (QoS). Energy-
aware QoS in wireless sensor networks will certainly ensure guaranteed bandwidth, or delay,
through the duration of a connection as well as provide the most energy-efficient path.

S. Saxena et al. review the main approaches for energy conservation in wireless sensor networks
in [9]. They presented a systematic and comprehensive classification of the solutions related to
save energy. This involves characterizing the interactions between different protocols and
exploiting cross-layer interactions. They also made a protocol classification and explain each
part. The authors comment that most of the solutions presented by other authors are based on the
assumption that the radio energy consumption is much higher than data sampling or processing
consumption, while many real applications have greater power consumption in data
sampling/processing than in radio transmission. Furthermore, they observed that the data
acquisition research field of has not been fully explored in terms of energy conservation. Finally,
the authors come to the conclusion that there is an increasing interest towards MAC protocols
used for time synchronization and energy conservation in the recent years. They also made a
reference to the node’s mobility, which is yet another challenging task in energy optimization.

Another survey related to protocols and energy-saving techniques is [10]. It was presented by K.
Akkaya et al. This paper surveys several routing protocols for sensor networks and presents a
classification of various pursued approaches. The classification is focused on three main
categories: data-centric, hierarchical and location-based. This work analyzes several protocols
that use contemporary methodologies such as network flow and quality of service modeling.
From this work, several conclusions can be extracted. On the one hand, many protocols base
their functions in some attributes such as data and query in order to avoid overhead-forming
clusters, the use of specialized nodes, etc. However, in some cases, where queries can be more
complex schemes, such attribute-value pairs may not be enough. On the other hand, routing
protocols based on cluster are carried out by group sensor nodes to efficiently relay sensed data
to the sink. The cluster heads are specialized nodes that are sometimes chosen in function of their
available energy. A cluster-head performs the data aggregation and sends it to the sink. The
authors show a table which summarizes the classification of the protocols covered in this survey.
They also included in the table whether the protocol is utilizing data aggregation or not, since it
is an important consideration for routing protocols in terms of energy saving and traffic
optimization. In their future works they will study the factors that affect cluster formation,
cluster-head communication and how to form clusters in order to improve energy consumption
and contemporary communication metrics, such as latency.

Finally, C. E. Jones et al. present in [11] a study on power saving techniques in WSN. This paper
addresses the incorporation of energy conservation considerations on all layers of the wireless
network protocol stack for mobile devices. Therefore, throughout the document, the authors
cover the protocol stack and gradually introduce various energy saving modes (starting from
low-power design within the physical layer). They show different sources of power consumption
within mobile terminals and general guidelines for reducing the power consumed. They also
show energy efficient protocols within the wireless networks’ MAC layer, power saving
protocols within the LLC layer and power aware protocols within the network layer. Finally,
they provide some battery power considerations that should be taken into account. As far as we
know, there is not any survey such as the one presented in this paper. We will tackle power
saving techniques and energy saving issues in WSNs from all perspectives, starting from the
hardware side until arriving at the routing protocol side.
After studying some research papers here we came to know and enlisted the following few
drawbacks of existing system in Wireless Sensor Networks:

 They have limited energy storage capability due to small form-factors.

 There is always a mismatch between the available energy budget for system operation
and the required energy budget to obtain desire lifetimes.
 Power consumption is more in case of wireless sensor network.
 The sensors in most WSNs typically use batteries, but it is generally infeasible to replace
or recharge all the batteries.
 Batteries used in wireless sensor network have limited recharge cycles.

Proposed plan of work:

To overcome from drawbacks of existing system we propose a new “Novel Technique for
efficient power management in Wireless Sensor Networks ”, and to develop a novel algorithm
for minimizing power consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks. By implementing this we are
going to achieve higher performance of the sensor network, minimizing the usage of power
consumption, enhancing and maximizing the timespan of wireless sensor network (WSN).
Towards this we mention few objectives and they are as follows:

Objectives of the Proposed Research Work:

The main objectives of our proposed research work are:

1. To Study the existing literature and formulate a novel technique that overcomes the
limitations of currently available systems.
2. Comparing different microcontrollers and RF transceivers on energy level and on
different modes of operation.
3. To design the nodes in a network to sleep for much longer periods during non
transmission of data.
4. To design the nodes to minimize the time to get in to sleep mode.
5. To design the nodes to minimize the time to awake from sleep mode.
 6. Configuring the MAC protocol.
7. To develop a novel algorithm for minimizing power consumption in Wireless Sensor
Networks.

Methodology

1. New algorithms will be developed for an effective method to optimize power reduction.
2. Novel architectures will be designed for the developed algorithms.
3. The designed architectures will be subsequently simulated in Network Simulator tool.

Advantages of Proposed System

 Insensitive to scaling of design variables.
 Easily parallelized for concurrent processing.
 Simple implementation, Derivative free.
 Very few algorithm parameters.
 Very efficient global search algorithm.
 They can operate for longer periods of time until hardware failure.
 Minimizes the power consumption during packet transmission and data processing.

Possible Outcome

By designing and implementing a Novel Technique for Efficient power management in

Wireless Sensor Networks, we are going to achieve higher performance of the sensor network,
minimizing the usage of power consumption, enhancing and maximizing the lifetime of wireless
sensor network. The proposed work is planning to achieve by generate a minimum of 3 papers to
be published in International Journals.
Plan of Research work:

Months Work

0-6 Literature survey

7-12 Design of proposed work

13-24 Implementation and result analysis

25-30 Documentations and Thesis

References:
[1] Sandra Sendra, Jaime Lloret, Miguel García and José F. Toledo, “Power Saving and Energy
Optimization Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks”, Journal Vol. 6, No. 6, September
2011.
[2] J. Lloret, M. Garcia, J. Tomás, F. Boronat, “GBP-WAHSN: A Group Based Protocol for
Large Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks” Journal of Computer Science and Technology –
2008, 23, pp. 461-480.
[3] M. Garcia, D. Bri, F. Boronat, J. Lloret, “A New Neighbor Selection Strategy for Group
Based Wireless Sensor Networks”, 4th International Conference on Networking and Services
(ICNS- 2008), Gosier, Guadalupe, March 16-21, 2008.
[4] M. Garcia, S. Sendra, G. Lloret and J. Lloret, “Monitoring and Control Sensor System for
Fish Feeding in Marine Fish Farms”, IET Communications, The Institution of Engineering and
Technology, 2011, IN PRESS.
[5] J. Lloret, M. Garcia, D. Bri and S. Sendra, “A Wireless Sensor Network Deployment for
Rural and Forest Fire Detection and Verification”, Sensors Vol. 9 Issue: 11, pp. 8722-8747
October 2009.
[6] G. Halkes, T. V. Dam, and K. Langendoen, “Comparing energy-saving MAC protocols for
wireless sensor networks”, ACM Mobile Networks and Applications, Vol. 10, Issue: 5, pp.783–
791, 2005.
[7] V. Raghunathan, S. Ganeriwal and M. Srivastava, “Emerging Techniques for Long Lived
Wireless Sensor Networks”, IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol.44, No.4, pp. 108-114, April
2006.
[8] N. A. Pantazis and D. D. Vergados, “A Survey on Power Control Issues in Wireless Sensor
Networks”, Journal on IEEE Communications Survey and Tutorials, Vol. 9, pp. 86-107,2007.
[9] S. Saxena, S. Mishra, A. Kumar and D. S. Chauhan, “Efficient Power Utilization Techniques
for Wireless Sensor Networks - A Survey”, International Journal on Computer Science and
Engineering, Vol. 3, Issue: 2, pp. 905-925, February 2011.
[10] K. Akkaya and M. Younis, “A Survey on Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks”,
Ad hoc Networks, Vol. 3, Issue 3, pp. 325-349, May 2005.
[11] C. E. Jones, K. M. Siva lingam, P. Agrawal and J. C. Chen, “A Survey of Energy
Efficient Network Protocols for Wireless Networks”, Journal of Wireless Networks
Archive, Vol. 7, Issue 4, pp 343-358, (2001).

Signature of the Candidate Signature of the Guide