CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION
1.1 WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be defined as a self-configured and
infrastructure-less wireless networks to monitor physical or environmental conditions,
such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants and to cooperatively
pass their data through the network to a main location or sink where the data can be
observed and analyzed. It has important applications such as remote environmental
monitoring and target tracking. This has been enabled by the availability, particularly in
recent years, of sensors that are smaller, cheaper, and intelligent. These sensors are
equipped with wireless interfaces with which they can communicate with one another to
form a network. The design of a WSN depends significantly on the application, and it
must consider factors such as the environment, the applications design objectives, cost,
hardware, and system constraint.
A sensor node, also known as a mote, is a node in a sensor network that is capable of
performing some processing, gathering sensory information and communicating with
other connected nodes in the network. It consists of three main components: nodes,
gateways, and software. The spatially distributed measurement nodes interface with
sensors to monitor assets or their environment. The acquired data is wirelessly
transmitted to the gateway, which provides a connection to the wired world where we can
collect, process, analyze, and present your measurement data using software. Routers are
a special type of measurement node that we can use to extend distance and reliability in a
WSN. It consists of autonomous devices with inbuilt sensors for monitoring various
environmental and physical conditions at various places and times.

1.2 APPLICATIONS OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

i)Health care monitoring:
The medical applications can be of two types: wearable and implanted. Wearable devices
are used on the body surface of a human or just at close proximity of the user.The
implantable medical devices are those that are inserted inside human body. There are
many other applications too e.g. body position measurement and location of the person,
overall monitoring of ill patients in hospitals and at homes. Body-area networks can
collect information about an individual's health, fitness, and energy expenditure.
ii)Environmental/Earth sensing:
There are many applications in monitoring environmental parameters, examples of which
are given below. They share the extra challenges of harsh environments and reduced
power supply.
A)Air pollution monitoring:
Wireless sensor networks have been deployed in several cities to monitor the
concentration of dangerous gases for citizens. These can take advantage of the ad hoc
wireless links rather than wired installations, which also make them more mobile for
testing readings in different areas.
b)Forest fire detection:
A network of Sensor Nodes can be installed in a forest to detect when a fire has started.
The nodes can be equipped with sensors to measure temperature, humidity and gases
which are produced by fire in the trees or vegetation. The early detection is crucial for a
successful action of the firefighters.

iii)Water quality monitoring:

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Water quality monitoring involves analyzing water properties in dams, rivers, lakes &
oceans, as well as underground water reserves. The use of many wireless distributed
sensors enables the creation of a more accurate map of the water status, and allows the
permanent deployment of monitoring stations in locations of difficult access, without the
need of manual data retrieval.
iv)Natural disaster prevention:
Wireless sensor networks can effectively act to prevent the consequences of natural
disasters, like floods. Wireless nodes have successfully been deployed in rivers where
changes of the water levels have to be monitored in real time.
v)Industrial monitoring:
a)Machine health monitoring:
Wireless sensor networks have been developed for machinery Condition-Based
Maintenance (CBM) as they offer significant cost savings and enable new functionality.
Wireless sensors can be placed in locations difficult or impossible to reach with a wired
system, such as rotating machinery and untethered vehicles.
b)Data logging:
Wireless sensor networks are also used for the collection of data for monitoring of
environmental information; this can be as simple as the monitoring of the temperature in
a fridge to the level of water in overflow tanks in nuclear power plants. The statistical
information can then be used to show how systems have been working. The advantage of
WSNs over conventional loggers is the "live" data feed that is possible.
vi)Water/Waste water monitoring:
Monitoring the quality and level of water includes many activities such as checking the
quality of underground or surface water and ensuring a countrys water infrastructure for
the benefit of both human and animal. It may be used to protect the wastage of water.

Fig.1.1 Wireless Sensor Network

Fig.1.2 A Sensor Node

1.3. MOBILE ADHOC NETWORK
A Mobile Adhoc NETwork (MANET) is one that comes together as
needed, not necessarily with any support from the existing infrastructure or any other
kind of fixed stations. We can formalize this statement by defining an ad hoc (ad-hoc or
adhoc) network as an autonomous system of mobile hosts (MHs) (also serving as
routers) connected by wireless links, the union of which forms a communication
network modeled in the form of an arbitrary communication graph. This is in contrast to
the well known single hop cellular network model that supports the needs of wireless
communication by installing Base Stations (BSs) as access points. In these cellular
networks, communications between two mobile nodes completely rely on the wired
backbone and the fixed BSs. In a MANET, no such infrastructure exists and the
network topology may dynamically change in an unpredictable manner since nodes are
free to move.
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Important characteristics of a MANET:

1. Dynamic Topologies: Nodes are free to move arbitrarily with different speeds;
thus, the network topology may change randomly and at unpredictable times. Some
Energy-constrained Operation or all of the nodes in an ad hoc network may rely on
batteries or other exhaustible means for their energy. For these nodes, the most important
system design optimization criteria may be energy conservation.
2. Limited Bandwidth: Wireless links continue to have significantly lower capacity than
infra

structured networks. In addition, the realized throughput of wireless

communications - after accounting for the effects of multiple access, fading, noise, and
interference conditions, etc., is often much less than a radio's maximum transmission rate
3. Security Threat: Mobile wireless networks are generally more prone to physical
security threats than fixed-cable nets. The increased possibility of eavesdropping,
spoofing, and minimization of denial-of service type attacks should be carefully
considered.
1.4 ROUTING PROTOCOLS
Routing is the process of choosing path over which the packets are sending. Some of
the adhoc network routing protocols are Proactive routing, Reactive routing, Hybrid
routing and Hierarchical routing protocols.

Fig.1.3Routing Protocol Types

1.4.1TABLE-DRIVEN ROUTING
Table-driven or proactive routing protocols finds routes to all possible
destinations ahead of time. The routes are recorded in the nodes routing tables and are
updated within the predefined intervals. Proactive routing protocols are faster in
decision making, but cause problems if the topology of the network continually changes.
These protocols require every node to

maintain one or more tables to store updated

routing information from every node to all other nodes. This type of protocols maintains
fresh lists of destinations and their routes by periodically distributing routing tables
throughout the network.
Examples of Table Driven Routing Protocols are:
Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR)
Destination Sequence Distance Vector (DSDV)
A)OPTIMIZED LINK STATE ROUTING PROTOCOL (OLSR)
It is an IP routing protocol optimized for mobile ad hoc networks, which can also
be used on other wireless ad hoc networks. OLSR is a proactive link-state routing
protocol, which uses hello and topology control (TC) messages to discover and then
disseminate link state information throughout the mobile ad hoc network. Individual
nodes use this topology information to compute next hop destinations for all nodes in the
network using shortest hop forwarding paths. Using Hello messages the OLSR protocol
at each node discovers 2-hop neighbor information and performs a distributed election of
a set of Multi Point Relays (MPRs). Nodes select MPRs such that there exists a path to
each of its 2-hop neighbors via a node selected as an MPR. These MPR nodes then source
and forward TC messages that contain the MPR selectors. This functioning of MPRs
makes OLSR unique from other link state routing protocols in a few different ways: The
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forwarding path for TC messages is not shared among all nodes but varies depending on
the source, only a subset of nodes source link state information, not all links of a node are
advertised but only those that represent MPR selections. Since link-state routing requires
the topology database to be synchronized across the network, OSPF perform topology
flooding using a reliable algorithm. Such an algorithm is very difficult to design for ad
hoc wireless networks, so OLSR doesn't bother with reliability; it simply floods topology
data often enough to make sure that the database does not remain unsynchronized for
extended periods of time.
B)DESTINATION-SEQUENCED DISTANCE-VECTOR ROUTING (DSDV)
It is a table-driven routing scheme for ad hoc mobile networks. The main
contribution of the algorithm is to solve the routing loop problem. Each entry in the
routing table contains a sequence number, the sequence numbers are generally even if a
link is present; else, an odd number is used. The number is generated by the destination,
and the emitter needs to send out the next update with this number. If a router receives
new information, and then it uses the latest sequence number. If the sequence number is
the same as the one already in the table, the route with the better metric is used. Stale
entries are those entries that have not been updated for a while. Such entries as well as the
routes using those nodes as next hops are deleted. The availability of paths to all
destinations in network always shows that less delay is required in the path set up
process. The method of incremental update with sequence number labels marks the
existing wired network protocols adaptable to Ad-hoc wireless networks.
1.4.2 ON-DEMAND ROUTING
Source-initiated or reactive routing protocols are on-demand procedures and create
routes only when requested to do so by source nodes. A route request initiates a
route-discover process in the network and is completed once a route is discovered. If it
exists, at the time of request, a route is maintained by a route-maintenance procedure
until either the destination node becomes irrelevant to the source or the route is no longer
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needed. Control overhead of packets is smaller than of proactive protocols. This type of
protocol finds a route on demand by flooding the network with Route Request packets.
Examples of on-demand algorithms are:
Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector(AODV)
Dynamic Source Routing(DSR)
A)AD HOC ON-DEMAND DISTANCE VECTOR (AODV) ROUTING
It is a routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and other wireless
ad hoc networks. It was jointly developed on July 2003 in Nokia Research Center,
University of California, Santa Barbara and University of Cincinnati by C. Perkins, E.
Belding-Royer and S.Das. AODV is the routing protocol used in ZigBee. There are
various implementations of AODV such as MAD-HOC, Kernel-AODV, AODV-UU,
AODV-UCSB and AODV-UIUC. The Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV)
algorithm enables dynamic, self-starting, multihop routing between participating mobile
nodes wishing to establish and maintain an ad hoc network. AODV allows mobile nodes
to obtain routes quickly for new destinations and does not require nodes to maintain
routes to destinations that are not in active communication. AODV allows mobile nodes
to respond to link breakages and changes in network topology in a timely manner. The
operation of AODV is loop-free, and by avoiding the problem offers quick convergence
when the ad

hoc network topology changes (typically, when a node moves in the

network). When links break, AODV causes the affected set of nodes to be notified so that
they are able to invalidate the routes using the lost link. One distinguishing feature of
AODV is its use of a destination sequence number for each route entry. The destination
sequence number is created by the destination to be included along with any route
information it sends to requesting nodes. Using destination sequence numbers ensures
loop freedom and is simple to program. Given the choice between two routes to a
destination, a requesting node is required to select the one with the greatest sequence
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number. It forms a route on-demand when a transmitting node requests one. However, it
uses source routing instead of relying on the routing table at each intermediate device.
This protocol is truly based on source routing whereby all the routing information is
maintained (continually updated) at mobile nodes. It has only two major phases, which
are Route Discovery and Route Maintenance. Route Reply would only be generated if the
message has reached the intended destination node (route record which is initially
contained in Route Request would be inserted into the Route Reply).
To return the Route Reply, the destination node must have a route to the source node. If
the route is in the Destination Node's route cache, the route would be used. Otherwise, the
node will reverse the route based on the route record in the Route Request message
header (this requires that all links are symmetric). In the event of fatal transmission, the
Route Maintenance Phase is initiated whereby the Route Error packets are generated at a
node. The erroneous hop will be removed from the node's route cache; all routes
containing the hop are truncated at that point. Again, the Route Discovery Phase is
initiated to determine the most viable route.
B)DYNAMIC SOURCE ROUTING PROTOCOL (DSR)
It is an on-demand protocol designed to restrict the bandwidth consumed by control
packets in ad hoc wireless networks by eliminating the periodic table-update messages
required in the table-driven approach. The major difference between this and the other
on-demand routing protocols is that it is beacon-less and hence does not require periodic
hello packet (beacon) transmissions, which are used by a node to inform its neighbors of
its presence. The basic approach of this protocol (and all other on-demand routing
protocols) during the route construction phase is to establish a route by flooding Route
Request packets in the network. The destination node, on receiving a Route Request
packet, responds by sending a Route Reply packet back to the source, which carries the
route traversed by the Route Request packet received.
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1.4.3HYBRID ROUTING
This type of protocol combines the advantages of proactive and reactive routing.
The routing is initially established with some proactively prospected routes and then
serves the demand from additionally activated nodes through reactive flooding. The
choice of one or the other method requires predetermination for typical cases.
Examples of hybrid algorithms are:
ZRP (Zone Routing Protocol)
ZHLS (Zone-based Hierarchical Link State Routing Protocol)
A) ZONE ROUTING PROTOCOL(ZRP)
ZRP is a hybrid Wireless Networking routing protocol that uses both proactive and
reactive routing protocols when sending information over the network. ZRP was designed
to speed up delivery and reduce processing overhead by selecting the most efficient type
of protocol to use throughout the route. If a packet's destination is in the same zone as the
origin, the proactive protocol using an already stored routing table is used to deliver the
packet immediately. If the route extends outside the packet's originating zone, a reactive
protocol takes over to check each successive zone in the route to see whether the
destination is inside that zone. This reduces the processing overhead for those routes.
Once a zone is confirmed as containing the destination node, the proactive protocol, or
stored route-listing table, is used to deliver the packet. In this way packets with
destinations within the same zone as the originating zone are delivered immediately using
a stored routing table. Packets delivered to nodes outside the sending zone avoid the
overhead of checking routing tables along the way by using the reactive protocol to check
whether each zone encountered contains the destination node. Thus ZRP reduces the
control overhead for longer routes that would be necessary if using proactive routing
protocols throughout the entire route, while eliminating the delays for routing within a
zone that would be caused by the route-discovery processes of reactive routing protocols.
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