A New Sentinel Approach for Energy Efficient and Hole Aware Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in micro-sensor and communication technology have enabled the emergence of a new technology, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). WSN have emerging recently as a key solution to monitor remote or hostile environments and concern a wide range of applications. These networks are faced with many challenges such as energy efficiency usage, topology maintenance, network lifetime maximization, etc. Experience shows that sensing and communications tasks consume energy, therefore judicious power management can effectively extend network lifetime. Moreover, the low cost of sensor devices will allows deployment of huge number nodes that can permit a high redundancy degree. In this paper, we focus on the problem of energy efficiency and topology maintenance in a densely deployed network context. Hence we propose an energy aware sleep scheduling and rapid topology healing scheme for long life wireless sensor networks. Our scheme is a strong node scheduling based mechanism for lifetime maximization in wireless sensor networks and has a fast maintenance method to cover nodes failure. Our sentinel scheme is based on a probabilistic model which provides a distributed sleep scheduling and topology control algorithm. Simulations and experimental results are presented to verify our approach and the performance of our mechanism. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]