Centrally Controlled Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

We present IMPERIA, a centrally managed architecture for large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSN). Within the WSN, sensor nodes communicate using a clustered multi-hop TDMA protocol, which globally synchronizes the network and collects data at ultra-low power consumption. The novel contributions to the state-of-the-art include a) an efficient algorithm for network topology discovery and link quality estimation, b) a clustering and routing algorithm for partitioning the complete WSN into multiple clusters with a priori defined base stations, and c) a scheduling algorithm for multi-cluster and multi-channel data collection incorporating message aggregation.
Additionally, we discuss the advantages of using a centralized management over distributed approaches and present the design of a centrally managed energy-efficient WSN. The resultant architecture was deployed in four different applications and has been implemented for two embedded operating systems: TinyOS and IBM’s Mote Runner. We report on its performance and discuss opportunities for further research into the centralized approach.
A shortened version of this paper has appeared in: Computer Networks 57(6) (April 2013) 1425–1442.