28-03-2014, 12:31 PM
A Fuzzy Approach to Energy Optimized Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks
Approach to Energy Optimized.pdf (Size: 290.02 KB / Downloads: 58)
Abstract:
In recent years, many approaches and techniques have been explored for the optimization of energy usage in
wireless sensor networks. Routing is one of these areas in which attempts for efficient utilization of energy have been made.
These attempts use fixed (crisp) metrics for making energy-aware routing decisions. In this paper, we present a generalized
fuzzy logic based approach for energy-aware routing in wireless sensor networks. This generalized approach is soft and
tunable and hence it can accommodate sensor networks comprising of different types of sensor nodes having different energy
metrics.
Introduction
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be safely
identified as one of the most important technologies of
recent times. Developments in the areas of VLSI,
WSNs storage and power management all have
contributed to this exciting area. WSNs have become
increasingly popular for both military and civil
applications such as target tracking, space exploration,
environmental control, habitat monitoring and patient
care [9, 2].
A wireless sensor network consists of a large
number of unattended, usually self-organized micro
sensors, of size of the order of a cubic centimeter,
scattered in an area for a specific application. Each
micro sensor is capable of sensing data from the
environment, performing simple computations and
transmitting this data over wireless medium either
directly to command centre or through some cluster
head, commonly known as gateway. WSNs although
have some similarities with ad-hoc networks but they
differ from ad-hoc networks mainly due to their more
severe energy constraints, much larger density of
sensor nodes, lower cost and usually static nature of
nodes. Moreover, WSNs are designed for information
gathering, rather than distributed computing.
Related Work
As wireless sensor networks differ from ad-hoc
networks in many aspects, separate routing protocols
for WSN have been proposed [14, 21, 5]. A survey of
recent routing protocols for WSNs and their
classification is given in [1].
Among the various approaches that have been
proposed in literature for minimizing the energy usage
in wireless sensor networks, energy-aware routing
attempts to extend the life of a WSN at network layer.
Energy-efficient routes can be computed using either
the minimum energy path, maximum residual energy
path, path with minimum number of hops to sink etc.
[2]. Chang et al [4] have argued that always selecting
the route with minimum energy will quickly deplete
the energy of sensor nodes on the minimum energy
path, thereby decreasing the life of WSN. Rahul et al.
[17] have presented an energy aware routing protocol
that keeps a set of minimal energy paths and randomly
selects one of these sub-optimal paths, thereby
significantly increasing the network lifetime.
System Model
Cluster-based routing has been shown to be quite
effective in wireless sensor networks [8]. The main
advantage of using this approach is that as the data
gathered by sensors in the close vicinity is usually
redundant, the gateway can perform the task of data
aggregation before sending it to the remote command
node (sink). Moreover, as WSN is usually formed for
a specific application, gateways can be chosen to be
much powerful as compared to the sensor nodes. This
relieves the energy-constrained sensor nodes of
communicating directly with the remote sink.
Conclusions
We have presented a novel fuzzy model for energy-
optimized routing in wireless sensor networks. Our
simulation results have demonstrated the reliability and
efficiency of this approach. Moreover, as fuzzy
approach is soft it can be easily tuned for different
network and node conditions simply by changing
shapes of the fuzzy sets.