Random Mobility and Heterogeneity-Aware Hybrid Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Random mobility of a node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) causes the frequent changes in the network dynamics with increased cost in terms of energy and bandwidth. During data collections and transmission, they need the additional efforts to synchronize and schedule the activities of nodes. A key challenge is to maintain the global clock scale for synchronization of nodes at different levels to minimize the energy consumption and clock skew. It is also difficult to schedule the activities for effective utilization of slots allocated for aggregated data transmission. The paper proposes the Random Mobility and Heterogeneity-aware Hybrid Synchronization Algorithm (MHS) for WSN. The proposed algorithm uses the cluster-tree for efficient synchronization of CH and nodes in the cluster and network, level-by-level. The network consists of three nodes with random mobility and are heterogeneous regarding energy with static sink. All the nodes and CH are synchronized with the notion of the global timescale provided by the sink as a root node. With the random mobility of the node, the network structure frequently changes causing an increase in energy consumption. To mitigate this problem, MHS aggregate data with the notion of a global timescale throughout the network. Also, the hierarchical structure along with pair-wise synchronization reduces the clock skews hence energy consumption. In the second phase of MHS, the aggregated data packets are passed through the scheduled and synchronized slots using TDMA as basic MAC layer protocol to reduce the collision of packets. The results are extended by using the hybrid approach of scheduling and synchronization algorithm on the base protocol. The comparative results show that MHS is energy and bandwidth efficient, with increased throughput and reduced delay as compared with state-of-the-art solutions.