On the energy-delay trade-off in geographic forwarding in always-on wireless sensor networks: A multi-objective optimization problem

• Published in: Computer networks (Amsterdam, Netherlands : 1999) Vol. 57; no. 9; pp. 1913 - 1935
• Main Author: Ammari, Habib M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier B.V 19-06-2013; Elsevier; Elsevier Sequoia S.A
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; Data forwarding; Delay; Energy; Energy consumption; Exact sciences and technology; Mathematical problems; Optimization; Protocol; Proxy forwarders; Radiocommunications; Sensors; Slicing; Software; Studies; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Trade-off; Tradeoff analysis; Wireless networks; Wireless sensor networks; Proxy forwarders; Wireless sensor networks; Energy; Trade-off; Slicing; Optimization; Delay; Data forwarding; Information system; Multiobjective programming; Data transmission; Efficiency; Battery; Mathematical programming; Capability index; Measurement sensor; Routing; Secondary cell; Longevity; Multi hop network; Geographical coordinate; Problem solving; Wireless network; Metric; Sensor array; Time complexity; Computer server; Data gathering
• ISSN: 1389-1286; 1872-7069
• DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2013.03.009

The design and development of multi-hop wireless sensor networks are guided by the specific requirements of their corresponding sensing applications. These requirements can be associated with certain well-defined qualitative and/or quantitative performance metrics, which are application-dependent. The main function of this type of network is to monitor a field of interest using the sensing capability of the sensors, collect the corresponding sensed data, and forward it to a data gathering point, also known as sink. Thus, the longevity of wireless sensor networks requires that the load of data forwarding be balanced among all the sensor nodes so they deplete their battery power (or energy) slowly and uniformly. However, some sensing applications are time-critical in nature. Hence, they should satisfy strict delay constraints so the sink can receive the sensed data originated from the sensors within a specified time bound. Thus, to account for all of these various sensing applications, appropriate data forwarding protocols should be designed to achieve some or all of the following three major goals, namely minimum energy consumption, uniform battery power depletion, and minimum delay. To this end, it is necessary to jointly consider these three goals by formulating a multi-objective optimization problem and solving it. In this paper, we propose a data forwarding protocol that trades off these three goals via slicing the communication range of the sensors into concentric circular bands. In particular, we discuss an approach, called weighted scale-uniform-unit sum, which is used by the source sensors to solve this multi-objective optimization problem. Our proposed data forwarding protocol, called Trade-off Energy with Delay (TED), makes use of our solution to this multi-objective optimization problem in order to find a “best” trade-off of minimum energy consumption, uniform battery power depletion, and minimum delay. Then, we present and discuss several numerical results to show the effectiveness of TED. Moreover, we show how to relax several widely used assumptions in order to enhance the practicality of our TED protocol, and extend it to real-world network scenarios. Finally, we evaluate the performance of TED through extensive simulations. We find that TED is near optimal with respect to the energy×delay metric. This simulation study is an essential step to gain more insight into TED before implementing it using a sensor test-bed.