A Self-Configurable Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In the past few years wireless sensor networks have received a greater interest in application such as disaster management, border protection, combat field reconnaissance and security surveillance. Wireless sensor networks are composed of large number of sensor nodes, which are limited in resources i.e. memory, energy and computation power. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) facilitate monitoring and controlling of physical environment from remote location with better accuracy. Sensor nodes are expected to operate autonomously in unattended environments and potentially in large numbers. Wireless sensor networks are prone to network dynamics such as node dying, being disconnected, node power on or off, and new nodes joining the network due to inhospitable environment and unattended deployment. Therefore, sensor networks need to be able to self-reconfigure themselves without knowing anything about network topology in advance. In this paper we propose a cellular self-configurable architecture for wireless sensor networks to energy efficiently re-organize the network topology due to network dynamics. The initial design of the cellular architecture has been described in a previous work and has been used in the context of fault management. The results obtained from simulation have shown that our self-configurable architecture is more energy efficient and achieves better energy consumption distribution.