Abstract
In wireless sensor networks, building energy-efficient systems is one of the major challenges. In such networks, nodes are usually supplied by low power and small batteries. Many factors are involved in the energy consumption, and this issue may be considered as a cross-layer problem, from the hardware architecture to the application layer. This paper aims at presenting a hybrid solution for sensor networks based on two main aspects. The first one is the hardware architecture, where we present a prototype of a sensor node we designed. This node proved its efficiency in terms of energy consumption. The second aspect is related to the topology construction and presents a new topology control algorithm based on graph computing. Thus, our system consists of a real indoor application for temperature and humidity monitoring, applicable to home automation or industrial monitoring. We performed the experiments using a set of sensor nodes deployed over a building and proved the efficiency of the system in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime and data delivery.
Highlights
Today, we assist the great emergence of wireless sensor networks
We developed an improved cluster-tree topology based on the minimum spanning tree (MST) that we called minimum spanning cluster-tree (MSCT)
In order to highlight the added value of our sensor device in terms of energy consumption and the performance of the network, it is imperative to note that the used microcontroller and ZigBee transceiver are, in addition to the low power consumption, open to be configured in all network layers, contrary to the commercial sensor nodes described in Tables 1 and 2, where it is very difficult to access or configure the operations performed in the physical and MAC layers
Summary
We assist the great emergence of wireless sensor networks. These kinds of networks are self-organized and consist in general of a large amount of autonomous sensor nodes with low resources transmitting sensed data to the base stations [1]. Most of the applications that require large-scale networks, such as the detection of forest fires, use high range transmission standards like IEEE 802.11b. Other applications, such as home automation that require less transmission range, use other standards, such as IEEE 802.15.4 related to ZigBee specifications. It is important to note that several works have been conducted to improve the energy efficiency of sensor networks by enhancing routing protocols, topology control and data aggregation, and the results are confirmed using simulation tools such as Ns-2, Omnet, MATLAB, etc. The first challenge that we tackle in this paper is to design a prototype of the sensor node that reduces the energy consumption while maintaining a high level of performance.
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