The Research On Low Power Data Dissemination In Chain-type Wireless Sensor Networks With Unreliable Links

Chain-type wireless sensor networks (CWSNs) have attracted lots of research effortdue to their wide-range of potential applications, such as gas monitoring in coal mine,and environment monitoring for railways and rivers. One of unique characteristics ofCWSNs is the unbalanced load. Sensor nodes, which are close to the sink node, need totransmit more packets than other nodes, resulting in more energy consumption andshorter lifetime. Another characteristic of CWSNs is the large number of hop counts,which can lead to long data transmission delay especially for the CWSN with unreliablelinks.In this paper, we propose two novel methods: the method to prolong the lifetime ofthe CWSN with unreliable links, and the method to reduce data dissemination delay inlow power CWSNs with unreliable links.First, we propose a novel sensor nodes deployment strategy. With a non-uniformdeployment method and an alternative duty mode, the low power sensor nodesdeployment strategy can balance the energy consumption of sensor nodes in CWSNswith unreliable links. Hence, the CWSN lifetime can be effectively prolonged. Numericalexperiments have been conducted, showing better performance of the proposed strategythan existing methods.Then, we propose low power fast data dissemination (FDD) for the CWSNs withunreliable links. Two key contributions are: calculation of an optimal dissemination pathwith an optimal chain-type schedule for the data dissemination, and design of anopportunistic transmission mechanism to opportunistically provide extra links in theCWSNs. Simulations have been conducted and results show that the proposed methodachieves shorter data dissemination delay than existing methods, while consumingsimilar energy. Moreover, we implement the FDD on WSN platform using CC2530based sensor nodes, and experiment results show that the FDD can effectively reduce the data dissemination delay.According to the theoretical analyses, simulation results and experiment results,these two methods can prolong CWSN lifetime and reduce data dissemination delay,respectively.