An energy‐efficient scheme for reporting events over WSNs

Abstract

PurposeEnergy consumption has always been the most serious issue to consider while deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Sensor nodes are limited in power, computational capacities and memory so reporting the occurrence of specific events, such as fire or flooding, as quickly as possible using minimal energy resources is definitely a challenging issue. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new, reactive and energy‐efficient scheme for reporting events. In this scheme, nodes that detect a certain event will organize themselves into a cluster, elect a clusterhead that will collect data from the cluster members, aggregate it and forward it to the mobile sink.Design/methodology/approachIn order to evaluate the scheme, a new sensor node model was designed, where the network layer is implemented from scratch. This layer contains the state process model of the algorithm which was made available through a high‐fidelity process modeling methodology.FindingsSimulation results show that a high‐event notification delivery ratio and a significant energy saving is achieved by deploying the proposed sensor node model; comparisons with existing methods show the efficiency of using the new scheme.Originality/valueThe new contribution in this paper is a novel, reactive and energy‐efficient scheme for reporting events over WSNs. The concept introduced in this paper will decrease energy consumption inside the network and, thus, improve its lifetime.