Four-tier network architecture for wireless sensor and actor networks
Nisha Singh, Mayank Dave · International Conference on Computing for Sustainable Global Development · 2016
Existing three-tier network architecture of Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) consists of three tiers i.e. tier-1 consisting of member sensor nodes and cluster heads, tier-2 consisting of actor nodes and finally tier-3 consisting of sink node(s). In this architecture, all the network management functions are to be performed either by sink node(s) or cluster heads or normal member sensor nodes or actor nodes or these nodes in combination. This increases the computation and memory overheads on the network nodes, especially the tier-1 nodes. This paper proposes four-tier architecture for WSANs which introduces a new tier consisting of the relay nodes between tier-1 and tier-2 of three-tier architecture. This newly introduced tier is responsible for performing various network management tasks such as security. The proposed architecture significantly reduces burden on the resource-constrained network nodes, hence increases the network lifetime.