Sequence Configuration With Self-Organized Function Structure for Networking of Smart Sensors

Abstract

The sustainable collection of sensing data is significant to the Internet of Things, smart factories, and big data technologies. Flexible connections among sensors are enabled by wireless multihop communication among sensors. Concerning the small size of sensing data, the length of addresses in each packet has a substantial impact on the amount of energy consumption at sensors. To sustain the wireless sensor networks (WSN) during periods of constrained energy supply, the smallest address size is desired to represent the IDs of sensors, in order to identify source, destination, and next-hop information in each packet of sensing data reports. On the other hand, the configuration of the smallest size addresses is significantly different from conventional address configuration procedures. The smallest address configuration requires both address uniqueness and the smallest use of address space, leading to the necessity of sequence configuration in distributed WSNs. This paper addresses the sequence configuration problem for efficiently configuring sensors with smallest size addresses. We first, to the best of our knowledge, explicitly examine the self-organized and optimized function structure for sequence configuration in sensor networks. We propose a scheme of dynamic function-structure based configuration that allows sensors to self-organize into function structures to efficiently configure minimum-size addresses and avoid address collisions. Quantitative analyses and computer simulation are conducted to verify the efficiency of the proposed approach.