On the design of resilient heterogeneous wireless sensor networks based on small world concepts

Abstract

In this work, we propose on-line models to design heterogeneous sensor network topologies with small world features. The proposed model takes into account the data communication flow in this kind of network to create network shortcuts toward the sink node in such a way that the communication between the sink and the sensor nodes is optimized. The endpoints of these shortcuts are nodes with more powerful hardware, leading to a heterogeneous sensor network. We evaluate the on-line models and show that they present the same small world features observed in the theoretical models. When the shortcuts are created toward the sink node, with a small number of powerful sensors, the network presents better small world features and interesting tradeoffs between energy and latency in the data communication when compared with the Random Additional Model. We evaluate the resilience of the on-line models considering general and specific failures and, in both cases, the proposed model is more robust and presents a graceful degradation of the network latency, which shows the resilience of those models.