Efficiency Evaluation of Strategies for Dynamic Management of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper presents and evaluates dynamic management strategies to improve efficiency in event-triggered wireless sensor networks.We are considering mobility, where nodes move themselves to maximize the coverage, and load balancing state-of-the-arttechniques, by which the number of nodes sensing the same area is reduced. To explore mobility, we present a simple methodby which nodes can dynamically reorganize themselves based on the force fields approach of mobile robotics. Firstly, the strategiesare evaluated separately through experiments with different network configurations and, afterwards, a joint evaluation has beenconducted to observe the impact of mobility on the efficiency of load balancing techniques. We show that mobile nodes significantlycontribute to keeping the coverage as nodes die in mesh and powerfully improving it in random deployments. Load balancingtechniques achieve important results, increasing lifetime and the number of sensed events. However, in random deployments,these techniques lose efficiency and become unsuitable strategies. Combining these strategies with mobility, we observe that PS-based technique keeps its contribution in mesh and random deployments, as well as improving its performance for not so densenetworks. Ant-based technique when combined with mobile nodes loses performance significantly in mesh and keeps its goodperformance in random deployed and less dense networks.