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Design and Evaluation of Network Reconfiguration Protocols for Mostly-Off Sensor Networks

Yuan Li, Wei Ye, John Heidemann, and Rohit Kulkarni
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

A new class of sensor network applications is mostly off. Exemplified by Intel's FabApp, in these applications the network alternates between being off for hours or weeks, then activating to collect data for a few minutes. While configuration of traditional sensornet applications is occasional and so need not be optimized, these applications may spend half their active time in reconfiguration every time when they wake up. Therefore, new approaches are required to efficiently ``resume'' a sensor network that has been ``suspended'' for long time. This paper focuses on the key question of when the network can determine that all nodes are awake and ready to communicate. Existing approaches assume worst-case clock drift, and so must conservatively wait for minutes before starting an application. We propose two reconfiguration protocols to largely reduce the energy cost during the process. The first approach is low-power listening with flooding, where the network restarts quickly by flooding a control message as soon as the first node determines that the whole network is up. The second protocol uses local update with suppression, where nodes only notify their one-hop neighbors, avoiding the cost of flooding. Both protocols are fully distributed algorithms. Through analysis, simulation and testbed experiments, we show that both protocols are more energy efficient than current approaches. Flooding works best in sparse networks with 6 neighbors or less, while local update with suppression works best in dense networks (more than 6 neighbors).

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Li07a: Yuan Li, Wei Ye, John Heidemann, and Rohit Kulkarni. Design and Evaluation of Network Reconfiguration Protocols for Mostly-Off Sensor Networks. Computer Networks, p. to appear, December, 2007. accepted in 2007, to appear in 2008. <doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2007.11.009>.

@article{Li07a,
	author = "Yuan Li and Wei Ye and John Heidemann and Rohit Kulkarni",
	title = "Design and Evaluation of Network Reconfiguration Protocols for Mostly-Off Sensor Networks",
	journal = "Computer Networks",
	year = "2007",
	month = "December",
	pages = "to appear",
	note = "accepted in 2007, to appear in 2008",
	keywords = "fabapp, fastbootmac, scp-mac",
	doi = "doi:10.1016/j.adhoc.2007.11.009",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Li07a.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Li07a.pdf",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2007 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.