Organic wireless sensor networks
Sharief Oteafy, Hossam S. Hassanein · 2014
We advocate for a novel paradigm in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). As a technology, it has evolved to a scalable networking paradigm with minimalistic operational mandates. However, inherited design principles of static functionality, that are pre-determined at design stage, hinder WSN evolvement. More importantly, while we design WSNs to endure harsh environments and scale in both urban and remote settings, we neglect two major factors. The over-deployment of WSNs renders many sensing nodes redundant in functionality, and inflates the cost of running applications; not to mention the resulting medium contention. In this paper we present a novel approach to expanding the operational scale of WSNs by adapting to the environment in which it is deployed. That is, capitalizing on an organic approach in thriving on available resources in the region of interest to reduce deployment cost, and solicit incentivized interaction among communicating resources to deliver dynamic sensing. Not only does this span a new dimension of reliability, over garnered resources, but presents a novel approach to assigning sensing tasks to available resources in correlation to their abundance and serviceability. We present our performance evaluation of reduction in operational costs, and the uptake of sensing tasks by neighboring resources via extensive simulations. We aim to benchmark WSN operational versatility and present a rigorous basis for evaluating the ability of WSNs to resiliently scale to new applications as well as handle intermittent and permanent failures.