Auto-configuration based opportunistic communications for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the demanding application-oriented networks whose primary goals are to provide information about physical environments without human intervention. In WSNs, it is typical that a huge number of resource-constrained sensor nodes are deployed over physical environments. Therefore, auto-configuration is essential for wireless sensor networks to form a network topology by individual nodes themselves. The importance of auto-configuration is also proved in that diverse wireless personal are network standards such as IEEE 802.15.5, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, and IETF ROLL have adopted auto-configuration function in their specification. In addition to this auto-configuration, opportunistic communications have been emerged as a solution to improve throughput of physical channels by exploiting broadcast nature of wireless medium and spatial diversity over lossy link environment of wireless sensor networks. In the opportunistic communications, packets are forwarded through competition among nodes who received broadcasted packets successfully, which is differently from traditional communication designating the next hop node, for the reliable packet delivery in vulnerable link conditions. This dissertation provides opportunistic communications composed of any-to-any multi-hop routing and multi-hop dissemination protocols based on auto-configuration of wireless sensor networks. The proposed algorithms are applied into auto-configuration phase in order to minimize bandwidth, memory, and processing cost during network operation phase considering the resource constraints of wireless sensor networks, and we also achieve efficient and reliable communication by exploiting opportunistic communications against lossy link environment of wireless sensor networks. The proposed algorithms in this dissertation are composed of network topology formation, any-to-any multi-hop routing, and multi-hop dissemination, which are essential functions for wireless sensor n...