New Power-Oriented Methodology for Dynamic Resizing and Mobility of Reconfigurable Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper deals with reconfigurable wireless sensor networks (RWSNs) that should be adapted to their environment in order to minimize the energy consumption during the communication among nodes and consequently to maximize the lifetime of the network as much as possible. An RWSN is assumed to be composed of a set of nodes located in distributed zones such that each node executes reconfigurable software tasks to control local sensors. We propose in a previous work a zone-based multiagent architecture for an RWSN where a communication protocol is well-defined to optimize distributed reconfigurations. This architecture combines all possible reconfiguration forms of the network to be adapted to its environment under energy constraints. With the multiagent architecture we gain in term of energy to be consumed by each node in the network. After applying a set of reconfiguration scenarios, the total charge of the network decreases. In order to preserve this charge as much as possible before the next recharging operation, in this particular study, we tend to resize geographically the zones in an RWSN. We propose also to move the mobile nodes in order to increase the network lifetime. A new run-time power oriented methodology is reported, which manages the zones and their mobile nodes in order to control the energy consumption. Two dynamic solutions are applied: 1) the resizing of zones and 2) the mobility of nodes. For the new proposed methodology, we present a set of equation systems to model the resizing of zones and the mobility of nodes. The solution of these systems allows us to conclude that we can conserve more energy during the communication among network elements (nodes, stations, and agents). The contributions are applied to a case study that we simulate with the reconfigurable wireless network environment 1 to analyze the research originality. 1 http://lisi-lab.wix.com/rwinproject