Virtual base station election for wireless sensor networks

In a classical wireless sensor network, a base station is often present to ensure efficient data collection. Endowed with typical hardware feature, especially with high energy level and good stockpiling capabilities, the base station completes the architecture as a required component for a wide range of applications. However, there are some projects where base station deployment should be avoided without reducing network efficiency. Thus, in a cold chain supervision project, itŠs not necessary to add base station to a wireless sensors network deployed inside a food or a medical truck. In this manner, it is a low-budget sensors network deployment. Moreover, such applications have to replicate data across all nodes and to maintain same information as well. In this paper, we propose databases updating model for homogeneous wireless sensors network deployed in a food truck without any base station. In this model, Virtual Base Station (VBS) is the node which is elected to act as classical base station during a specific period of time. Virtual Base Station (VBS) electionŠs algorithm is based on the remaining energy for each node and latest Virtual Bases Station (VBS) to reduce overall energy spent by network. Simulation results (using MATLAB) show that VBS model introduces very low overhead with respect to the classical network with permanent Base Station (BS).