Supporting group communication among interacting agents in wireless sensor networks

Nowadays, the efficiency of multiagent systems in wireless sensor networks prompts the researchers to use these emerging mobile software packets in different simulated approaches or real-world applications. Heterogeneous and distributed wireless sensor networks could be integrated with the multiagent systems to map the real-world challenges into the artificial intelligence world. The multiagent systems have been applied from simulated approaches like object detection/tracking, healthcare, control/assistant, and security systems to real-world applications, including medical/human-care systems and unmanned aerial vehicles. Furthermore, the integration of wireless sensor networks with multiagent systems have emerged novel application, which is known as mobile robots. However, the extensive use of mobile agents in wireless sensor networks has posed different challenges for researchers, including security, resource, and timing limitation. In this work, we review recent simulated approaches and real-world applications of multiagent systems in wireless sensor networks, in which a set of common factors about the things that have been studied are extracted and compared to analyze the performance of mobile agent–based systems in the wireless sensor networks, as well. This analysis provides new research directions about multiagent systems in wireless sensor networks for interested researchers. Finally, a novel framework for dealing with the challenges of multiagent-based applications in the wireless sensor networks which have been mentioned is suggested.

With the advent of ubiquitous computing society, many advanced technologies have enabled wireless sensor networks which consist of small sensor nodes. However, the sensor nodes have limited computing resources such as small size memory, low battery life, short transmission range, and low computational capabilities. Thus, decreasing energy consumption is one of the most significant issues in wireless sensor networks. In addition, numerous applications for wireless sensor networks are recently spreading to various fields (health-care, surveillance, location tracking, unmanned monitoring, nuclear reactor control, crop harvesting control, u-city, building automation etc.). For many of them, supporting security functionalities is an indispensable feature. Especially in case wireless sensor networks should provide a sufficient variety of security functions, sensor nodes are required to have more powerful performance and more energy demanding features. In other words, simultaneously providing security features and saving energy faces a trade-off problem. This paper presents a novel energy-efficient security architecture in an IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor network called the Hybrid Adaptive Security (HAS) framework in order to resolve the trade off issue between security and energy. Moreover, we present a performance analysis based on the experimental results and a real implementation model in order to verify the proposed approach.

Data gathering is a major function of many applications in wireless sensor networks. The most important issue in designing a data gathering algorithm is how to save energy of sensor nodes while meeting the requirements of special applications or users. Wireless sensor networks are characterized by centralized data gathering, multi-hop communication and many to one traffic pattern. These three characteristics can lead to severe packet collision, network congestion and packet loss, and even result in hot-spots of energy consumption thus causing premature death of sensor nodes and entire network. In this paper, we propose a load balance data gathering algorithm that classifies sensor nodes into different layers according to their distance to sink node and furthermore, divides the sense zone into several clusters. Routing trees are established between sensor node and sink depending on the energy metric and communication cost. For saving energy consumption, the target of data aggregation scheme is adopted as well. Analysis and simulation results show that the algorithm we proposed provides more uniform energy consumption among sensor nodes and can prolong the lifetime of sensor networks.

Resource Management Approach to an Efficient Wireless Sensor Network

ABSTRACTLocation information of sensor nodes is of vital importance for most applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper proposes a new range-free localisation algorithm using support vector machine (SVM) and polar coordinate system (PCS), LSVM-PCS. In LSVM-PCS, two sets of classes are first constructed based on sensor nodes’ polar coordinates. Using the boundaries of the defined classes, the operation region of WSN field is partitioned into a finite number of polar grids. Each sensor node can be localised into one of the polar grids by executing two localisation algorithms that are developed on the basis of SVM classification. The centre of the resident polar grid is then estimated as the location of the sensor node. In addition, a two-hop mass-spring optimisation (THMSO) is also proposed to further improve the localisation accuracy of LSVM-PCS. In THMSO, both neighbourhood information and non-neighbourhood information are used to refine the sensor node location. The results obtained verify that the proposed algorithm provides a significant improvement over existing localisation methods.

Developing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) applications is not an easy task, since it demands different expertise and knowledge. To address this problem, we propose a model-driven approach to build WSN applications. It promotes the separation of concerns between two levels of requirements involved: (i) domain experts, with no knowledge on WSN platforms, contribute to the development of applications, (ii) network experts, with no knowledge on the application domain, program nodes to meet application requirements. Our approach also promotes the reuse of software artifacts: an application model can be reused on different sensor platforms and a platform model can be reused for different WSN applications.

A Wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises several sensor nodes such as magnetic, thermal, and infrared, and the radar is set up in a particular geographical area. The primary aim of sensor network is to transmit reliable, secure data from one node to another node, node to base station and vice versa and from base station to all nodes in a network and to conserve the energy of sensor nodes. On the other hand, there are several restrictions such as large energy consumption, limited storage/memory and processing ability, higher latency, and insufficient resources. The related security issues in wireless sensor network are authenticity, confidentiality, robustness, integrity, and data freshness. The sensor nodes are susceptible to several attacks such as DOS, Sybil, flood, black hole, selective forwarding which results in the leakage of sensitive and valuable information. It is therefore necessary to provide security against these critical attacks in the network. Wireless sensor network were earlier used for military applications with the objective of monitoring friendly and opposing forces, battlefield surveillance, detection of attacks, but today Wireless Networking have a huge number of applications-environmental, healthcare, home, industrial, commercial and are still counting. This paper is an extensive review of the security requirements, attacks that are to be avoided and resolved for achieving a secure network connection. This paper also emphasizes various limitations and defense strategies to prevent threats and attacks. The issues of applications of wireless sensor network for smooth and reliable transmissions are also discussed. The sensor networks are popular for mission-critical-tasks and security is immensely required for such hostile environment employed networks.

In some applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN), sensor nodes are mobile while the sinks are static. In such dynamic environment, situations may arise where many sensor nodes are forwarding data through the same sink node resulting in sink overloading. One of the obvious effects of sink overloading is packet loss. It also indirectly affects the network lifetime in loss-sensitive WSN applications. Therefore, proper placement of sinks in such dynamic environment has a great impact on the performance of WSN applications. Multiple sink placement may not also work in some situations as node density may not be uniform. This paper introduces a sink placement scheme that aims at gathering experiences about sensor node density in a region at different times and based on these observations, the scheme proposes candidate sink locations in order to reduce sink overloading. Next, based upon current sensor node density pattern, sinks at these locations are scheduled to active mode, while sinks at remaining candidate locations are scheduled to sleep mode. The second phase is repeated periodically. The scheme is implemented in a simulation environment and compared with another well-known strategy, namely Geographic Sink Placement (GSP). It has been observed that the proposed scheme exhibits better performance with respect to sink overloading and packet loss in comparison with GSP.

The range of applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is increasing continuously despite of their serious constraints of the sensor nodes’ resources such as storage, processing capacity, communication range and energy. The main issues in WSN are the energy consumption and the delay in relaying data to the Sink node. This becomes extremely important when deploying a big number of nodes, like the case of industry pollution monitoring. We propose an artificial neural network based energy-efficient and robust routing scheme for WSNs called ELDC. In this technique, the network is trained on huge data set containing almost all scenarios to make the network more reliable and adaptive to the environment. Additionally, it uses group based methodology to increase the life-span of the overall network, where groups may have different sizes. An artificial neural network provides an efficient threshold values for the selection of a group's CN and a cluster head based on back propagation technique and allows intelligent, efficient, and robust group organization. Thus, our proposed technique is highly energy-efficient capable to increase sensor nodes’ lifetime. Simulation results show that it outperforms LEACH protocol by 42 percent, and other state-of-the-art protocols by more than 30 percent.

Many sensor network applications are tightly coupled with the geometric environment where the sensor nodes are deployed. The topological skeleton extraction for the topology has shown great impact on the performance of such services as location, routing, and path planning in wireless sensor networks. Nonetheless, current studies focus on using skeleton extraction for various applications in wireless sensor networks. How to achieve a better skeleton extraction has not been thoroughly investigated. There are studies on skeleton extraction from the computer vision community; their centralized algorithms for continuous space, however, are not immediately applicable for the discrete and distributed wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we present a novel Connectivity-bAsed Skeleton Extraction (CASE) algorithm to compute skeleton graph that is robust to noise, and accurate in preservation of the original topology. In addition, CASE is distributed as no centralized operation is required, and is scalable as both its time complexity and its message complexity are linearly proportional to the network size. The skeleton graph is extracted by partitioning the boundary of the sensor network to identify the skeleton points, then generating the skeleton arcs, connecting these arcs, and finally refining the coarse skeleton graph. We believe that CASE has broad applications and present a skeleton-assisted segmentation algorithm as an example. Our evaluation shows that CASE is able to extract a well-connected skeleton graph in the presence of significant noise and shape variations, and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.

The ever-growing increase in modern and ubiquitous applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is causing energy scarcity, which is a serious threat to the lifetime of the network. Wireless power transfer emerges as a promising solution to replenish the sensor nodes. In wireless power transfer, energy is transferred to sensor nodes through dedicated energy transmitters. In addition, software-defined WSNs (SDWSNs) have been recently realized to fully explore and efficiently utilize the resources of WSNs. In this paper, we present an energy efficient SDWSN with wireless power transfer. We propose a mechanism to place energy transmitters and determine minimum number of energy transmitters. For placement of energy transmitters, a tradeoff between maximum energy charged in the network and fair distribution of energy is studied. We present this mechanism by defining a utility function to maximize both total energy charged and fairness. For minimum number of energy transmitters, an optimization problem is formulated and solved while satisfying the constraint on minimum energy charged by each sensor node. We also propose an energy-efficient scheduling scheme for energy transmitters for the given tasks of energy charging. The focus is to minimize the energy consumption of energy transmitters while keeping sensor nodes sufficiently charged. Finally, this paper is supported by extensive simulation results, which illustrate the performance of energy-efficient SDWSNs with wireless power transfer in terms of energy charged, fairness, number of energy transmitters, number of tasks, and energy consumption.

This chapter presents a combined approach to visualize the IoT and cyber-physical system in any wireless communication networks. The brief overview of IoT and its applications in wireless sensor network (WSN) are elaborated in current era. In today’s present situation and the challenges faced during COVID-19 pandemic how the things can be monitored through IoT is being focused in this chapter. Also, the threats challenges and monitoring of cyber-physical system for security is presented in analysis form. WSN provides a bridge between the physical and virtual world and finds use in numerous applications like environmental monitoring, civil structural health monitoring and industrial process monitoring. Lately, it has found much use in the latest technology called Internet of Things (IoT). It seems that IoT has a great potential in shaping our future where everything will be connected together all the time. The major challenges faced by WSN include energy-efficiency, heterogeneity, and systematic design. WSN comprise of autonomous sensors which are capable of wirelessly transmitting their sensed parameter-values (also called packets) to remotely 188located sink node. The sink node is a WSN node which has the capability to assemble the data from all the nodes and forward it to farther distances to the remote base station through wired connections. The data transmission from source node to sink node is done by taking multi-hops which means that data is not sent directly to the destination node but through jumping from one intermediate node to another until the sink is reached. The sensor nodes also act as wireless routers which transmit data to other sensor-routers. So, sensor devices are very useful in deployment, collection of data, act as a IoT sensor devices as an application in technology. IoT is a device which can be used as application while a cyber-physical system is a collection of various mechanical components which are controlled and managed by different devices and algorithms. An IFM (Information Flow Monitor) is an application to backtrack queries and find the culprit in an error that has occurred in the cyber system. However, while backtracking and flow monitoring is not always guaranteed in terms of secure and efficient transaction. In some cases, the sender may deny the authority of the data so the information flow monitors may fail to provide a trustful and authentic source of data. Thus, the chapter focuses on both the issues of IoT integration with cyber-physical security (CPS) system. The key challenges and some solutions are proposed for the researchers for future work.

Monte Carlo Methods for Node Self-Localization and Nonlinear Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

For mission-critical applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) involving extensive battlefield surveillance, medical healthcare, etc., it is crucial to have low-power, new protocols, methodologies and structures for transferring data and information in a network with full sensing coverage capability for an extended working period. The upmost mission is to ensure that the network is fully functional providing reliable transmission of the sensed data without the risk of data loss. WSNs have been applied to various types of mission-critical applications. Coverage preservation is one of the most essential functions to guarantee quality of service (QoS) in WSNs. However, a tradeoff exists between sensing coverage and network lifetime due to the limited energy supplies of sensor nodes. In this study, we propose a routing protocol to accommodate both energy-balance and coverage-preservation for sensor nodes in WSNs. The energy consumption for radio transmissions and the residual energy over the network are taken into account when the proposed protocol determines an energy-efficient route for a packet. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is able to increase the duration of the on-duty network and provide up to 98.3% and 85.7% of extra service time with 100% sensing coverage ratio comparing with LEACH and the LEACH-Coverage-U protocols, respectively.

In mobility-centric environments, wireless sensor networks are designed to accommodate energy efficiency, dynamic self-organization and mobility. In typical applications of wireless sensor networks, fixed sensor nodes are mixed with mobile sensor nodes in "hot areas". Also, as they move, network topology needs to be reconstructed by reacting upon the mobility of sensor nodes quickly. In this paper we proposed an improved protocol called "LEACH-Mobile" for mobile nodes to declare the membership of a cluster as they move, and to confirm whether a mobile sensor node is able to communicate with a specific cluster head within a time slot allocated in TDMA schedule. The LEACH-Mobile protocol achieved definite improvement in data transfer success rate as mobile nodes increased compared to the non-mobility centric LEACH protocol