Context Aware Resource Allocation in Distributed Sensor Networks

Abstract

Distributed Sensor Networks (DS'.s) have been an area for active research over the past few years, due to potentially widespread applications in creating smart computing environment. In this work, we have proposed new smart computing environment for super/hyper market. The proposed system uses Distributed Sensor Networks (DSN's) for real-time tracking of the products. While new technologies are making sensors nodes smarter, smaller, and cheaper, it is very challenging to find an optimal to allocate sensors and other network resources. Context awareness is one of the methods to improve resource utilization in Distributed Sensor Networks (DSN's). We have studied Indian retail industry as case study and we listed out the drawbacks of Indian retail industry. But proposed system can be applied to most of the retail industries across the globe to overcome similar problems. As a part of proposed system, we have derived many contexts in retail industry based on human perspective. At a basic level of design, sensors are deployed in each rack which provides the real time information about available products in each rack. This information can be used by warehouse manager, store manager for day to day activity in super/hyper market. R&D team can also use this information to understand consumer behaviour. The context information derived from sensor node is used in allocation sensor node or resources. We have tested our proposed system using Castalia simulation tool, a derivative of OMNeT++. The results obtained from our experiment shows advantages of context aware system. As DSN's are data centric, analyzing and implementing system in user context prospective will greatly contribute in terms of cost, performance. We have simulated the context aware resource allocation in distributed sensor networks to test the operation scheme in terms of performance parameters. The DSN's promise to revolutionize sensing in a wide range of application domains. This is because of their reliability, accuracy, flexibility, cost effectiveness and ease of deployment, Smart sensors can offer vigilant surveillance and can detect and collect data.