Collaborative routing and data delivery architecture for commercial wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Abstract Lately, wireless sensor network applications have emerged for provision of commercial services to end users. This results in commercial deployment of sensor networks which is as an important research area due to a number of design and quality of service challenges. An important technical challenge for sensor service provision to end users is managing dynamic network conditions such as unreliability of sensor nodes and network links which results in frequent service outages. This research is aimed at addressing this challenge. It presents a novel architecture which utilizes the availability of multiple sensor networks under different administrative domains, deployed in an area such that maximum network connectivity and high service availability are ensured. The architecture incorporates modifications and enhancements at the medium access control and the routing layers of sensor nodes for the collaborative operation of sensor networks. The design is based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard and ad hoc on demand distance vector routing protocol. The proposed architecture is mathematically analyzed with regards to overheads associated with the design such as routing and communication, and techniques to minimize these overheads are recommended. Through simulations using OMNET++, we show that the proposed architecture effectively provides connectivity for disconnected nodes achieving an overall increase in throughput for all the cooperating networks.