Ubiquitous Computing and Communication Journal

DISTRIBUTED WIRELESS MOBILE SENSOR NETWORK MODEL

AND EFFICIENT ROUTING ADOPTED TO DYNAMIC CHANGE OF
TOPOLOGY
Prof. P. Kalyani, Dr.C.Chellappan
Department of CSE, I.R.T.T., Erode, India.
Email: kalyani_irtt@yahoo.co.in

ABSTRACT
Integration of heterogeneous wireless networks poses challenges and limitations in
building multiple interfaces and corresponding bridges/ gateways functionalities.
Integration of heterogeneous wireless networks enables the information exchange
across multiple wireless networks which are difficult now. We propose a wireless
mobile sensor network in a distributed environment is a new architectural model
that merges the advantages of wireless mesh networks, cellular networks, and
wireless sensor networks and the data from Wireless Sensor Networks send to
Internet through the Cellular Network. Integration of the sensor network which
ride on cellular networks taking the advantages of GPS technology in collecting
enormous data about environment like temperature, humidity, air pollution level
etc. at low-cost. This rich, up-to-date, data collection helps researches to take
dynamic decision and passing the same to the people instantaneously. In this paper
we propose a scalable architecture DWMSN and analyze key research issues in
routing adapted to mobility of both sink and node. A new method is proposed for
an efficient protocol adopting the dynamic change of topology due to strong
mobility. Further a prototype design is proposed for environmental monitoring
and surveillance (EMS) applications under DWMSN architectural model.
Keywords: Wireless Mobile Sensor Networks, DWMSN, Environmental sensors,
environmental monitoring system, EMS.
1. RELATED WORK
Recent advances in wireless sensor have led to
many new protocols specifically designed for sensor
networks where energy awareness is an essential
consideration. Most of the attention however has
been given to the routing protocols since they might
differ depending on the applications and network
architecture.[4,7] Sensor nodes are constrained in
energy supply and bandwidth. Such constraints
combined with a typical deployment of large number
of sensor nodes have posed many challenges to the
design and management of sensor networks. These
challenges necessitate energy awareness at all layers
of networking protocol stack. The issues related to
physical and link layers are generally common for all
kind of sensor applications, therefore the research on
these areas has been focuses on energy aware MAC
protocols.[3,10,11] At the network layers, the main
aim is to find ways for energy efficient route setup
and reliable relaying of data from the sensor nodes to
the sink so that the life time of the network is
maximized. The application of wireless sensor
networks in a distributed environment [6] is to create
awareness to the people about the environmental
factors and providing reliable information and then

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enabling for intelligent decision making.

1.1 Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)
The flexibility, fault tolerance, high sensing, self
organization, fidelity, low-cost and rapid deployment
characteristics of sensor networks are ideal to many
new and exciting applications areas such as military,
environment monitoring, intelligent control, traffic
management, medical treatment, manufacture
industry and so on[8].The existing protocols for
WSNs are built on the network architecture (ie) flat
architecture
such that all sensor nodes are
homogeneous and send their data to a single sink
node by multiple hops [9] Such a flat architecture is
inapplicable to many real applications with largescale, heterogeneous sensor nodes, the flat
architectural model inherently has the following
problems.
1.
2.
3.

Unbalance energy consumption among

modes.
Poor scalability and Poor robustness
Single point of failure causes total failure.

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Owing to above limitations of traditional
architecture of WSNs, Distributed wireless mobile
sensor networks-DWMSNs is designed to improve
scalability, reliability and throughput of sensor
network and to support mobility of both sink and
nodes. The characteristics of routing in sensor
network that makes it different from that of
traditional communication and wireless ad_hoc
network. To deal with the specific characteristics of
sensor nodes along with the application and
topology, many routing mechanisms have been
proposed. [1,4] Almost all of them can be classified
as data centric, hierarchical or location based
although there are few distinct based on network
flow or QoS awareness.
1.2

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN)

WMN is a kind of new wireless network

architecture paid more and more attention recently.
[2,12] WMNs is a self organized, self configured and
decentralized wireless network. There are two kinds
of nodes in WMN: 1. Mesh router. 2. Mobile client.
Mesh routers with powerful capacities and lower
mobility are automatically setup and maintain
wireless connection forming the backbone of
WMNs. One of the most significant characteristics of
WMNs is that it provides interconnections among all
networked nodes, where each node can send and
receive data directly to each other. WMNs are able to
automatically discover topology change and self
adaptively modify routing for more efficient data
transmission. Moreover WMNs are teach to achieve
load balance by routing parts of data to gateway
nodes with lower load. The proposed issue of
network integration of wireless sensor networks
with WMNs(fig.1.) highlighted and connected to
internet through the gateway .

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1.3 Network Integration

By deploying some super mesh nodes as
gateway node with capacities to transmit data in a
long-distance way and self-organize reliably,
DWMSN merges the advantages of WMN mesh
networks and WSN. It provides the capacities to
interconnect
multiple
homogeneous
and
heterogeneous sensor networks, and to improve
scalability, robustness and data throughput of sensor
networks and support the mobility of nodes (both
sink and node) there by adaptive to dynamically
changing environment and topology.
2

PROBLEM DEFINITION And ISSUES

Routing is highly related to network architecture.

Also for DWMSN there has not yet a well defined
architectural model with scalability, robustness. Also,
there is a lack of efficient
routing protocols for
DWMSN considering multiple mobile sink nodes
adapting to mobility. This paper addresses the above
challenging issues focusing on these parts:
1).
The proposed protocols supports
mobility adoption for dynamically changing
topology due to strong mobility of nodes
and needs synchronization of nodes.
2.)
Efficient
routing
protocols
adopting
mobility
and
aiming
at
maximizing the lifetime of the sensor
networks.
3.)
Design of a prototype to WSN
architectural model for environmental
monitoring

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Ubiquitous Computing and Communication Journal

3.

3. PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE
DWMSN supports mobility of sensor nodes and
each sensor networks includes
more than one
Wireless Gateway Nodes (sink). This model can
easily connect
multiple homogeneous (or)
heterogeneous sensor networks. The Gateways and
routers deployed in different sensor networks
automatically interconnect to form a mesh network
while are connected with internet through power full
base station. The Advantages of WMNs are applied
to mobile sensor network and a new architecture is
proposed DWMSN as shown in Fig 2.

4.

They support multihop routing. This means

that data from a node can jump through
multiple nodes before delivering its
information to a host gateway (or)
controller that may be monitoring the
network.
They support mobility of both sink and
node there by adapting the dynamic change
of topology.

4. EFFICIENT ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR

WMSN
Most of the routing protocols [4] for sensor
networks require location information for sensor
network. The location information needed in order to
calculate the distance between two nodes since there
is no addressing scheme for sensors networks like IP
addresses and they are spatially deployed on a
region location information can be utilized in routing
data in an energy efficient way. [13,14] For example
of the region to be sensed is known using location of
sensors, the query can be diffused only to that
particular region which will eliminate the number of
transmission significantly.
In traditional architecture of sensor networks
with a single sink, sensor nodes around the sink (Fig.
3.a) inevitably drain their energy ahead of other
nodes because of more heavy data forwarding,
whether using flat, hierarchical or other routing.

There are three logical layers.

1. Lower layer wireless sensor networks for
monitoring
and
reporting
objects:
information (eg. Temperature, humidity)
2.
Middle layer wireless mesh network for
transmitting sensed data in long distance
and reliable way.
3. Upper layer Internet for users to remotely
access sensed data.
State of the art DWMSN often has some of the
following characteristics.
1.

2.

They are self-forming. As nodes are

powered on, they automatically enter the
network.
They are self-healing. As a node leaves the
network the remaining nodes automatically
re-routed their signals around the out-ofnetwork. Node to ensure a more reliable
communication path.

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The issues taken in this paper for routing

protocols is the consideration of nodes mobility.
Almost all the current protocols assume that the
sensor nodes and the sink are stationary. However,
there might be situation such as battle environment
where the sink and the sensors need to be mobile. In
such case, the frequent update of the position of the
command node and the sensor nodes and the
propagation of that information safely through the

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wireless network may excessively drain the energy
of nodes. New routing algorithms are needed in order
to handle the overhead of mobility and dynamic
changes of topology in such changing and unsafe
environment. We propose a new routing protocol
which supports mobility adoption
Another issue of routing protocols includes the
integration of sensor networks with wired network
(eg) internet. Most of the applications in security and
environmental monitoring require the data collected
from sensor nodes to be transmitted to a server so
that further analysis can be done. On the other hand
the request from the user should be made to the sink
through internet. Since the routing requirement of
each environment is different we have to consider
the mobility of node and sink so the location changed
and need to interface between wired networks to
sensor networks.[11]

Deploying multiple gateways in a sensor

network (Fig. 4.a) aims at overcoming this problem,
as well as improving network performance and
lengthening network lifetime. [10] The multiple
routers deployed in different sensor networks
automatically interconnect to form a mesh network
while are connected with internet through power full
base station. (Fig.4.b).
5. MOBILITY ADAPTION
Consider a multi hop wireless sensor network
with homogeneous sensor nodes and gateways.
Ni (a) (i hop neighbors of a node where i =
1,2,3,.)
PPi (a,b) > Probability that a N(b)
The network topology could change due to a)
Node join b) Node failures c) Concurrent node join /
failure d) Physical mobility of individual nodes e)
Physical mobility of gateways/sink. Nodes may fail
due to hardware failure or energy drained more than
one nodes may concurrently fail or join the network.
Such failures are more difficult to handle by the
MAC protocol then individual nodes. The physical
mobility of sensor nodes and gateways called strong
mobility where as the usual change in topology due
to node failure by hardware or battery consumption
is called weak mobility.
Node join:
a in Ni (b) In mobility or join transaction where
a Ni (b) after transaction not
before.
Node Failure:
a out Ni (b) _ Out mobility or failure transaction
where a Ni (b) before transaction not
after.
The factor effecting the probability P. Pi (a,b)
when initially a Ni (b)s node failure and also
effects a Out Ni (b) in mobile network model
(MNM). Hence the node join can occur if a) new
nodes deployed b) nodes wakeup often a long time
c) nodes recover from failure also node join can
occur for the reason of a in Ni (b) d) nodes
physically moves e) gateways physically moves.
Fi > Complete frame i under consideration
t frame time.
INi (a) _ Nodes expected to join N2(a) in Fi
Out (a) _ Nodes expected to depart n2(a) in Fi
In MNM(Mobile Network Model), we assume
the nodes to be static during Fi. The mobility
behavior of N2 (a) in Fi is predicted during Fi-1. If a
node b is expected to leave N2(a) during Fi then b
N2(a) from the STAET of Fi. Similarly a node is
expected to join N2(a) during Fi then b N2(a) from
START of Fi. In other words (INi (a) Union OUT i
(a)) N2(a) from the start of Fi.

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Ubiquitous Computing and Communication Journal

Mobility adoption algorithm uses location
information to predict the mobility behavior of
sensor nodes. Localization and mobility estimation
along with mobility state prediction is a well studied
problem [15,16]. We identified the following issues
with the adoptive algorithm to support strong
mobility:
1. Broadcast of future mobility state information of
current sensor node to all other nodes for
a) Fixing the N/W topology at that time
b) Needed to calculate new time frame for collision
free access ( predefined or random)
2. Need synchronization of nodes due to
independent computation of time frame at nodes that
may different for each node.
To address these issues we deploy the Mesh
Gate Ways in WSN as cluster head and will also
aggregate the data and act as a router to send the
data to internet via the base station. We model the
gateways as G = {(Gi, ( Xj, Yi))}: 1<=i<=n, ( Xj, Yi)
represents any point located in the sensor network},
where n is the number of gateways. In our model
sensor node Si (1<=i<m) keep on static or moving
while gateway(s) Gj (1<=j<=n) discretely move(s)
with in the range of its sensor network. and the
number of gate ways selected is 5% which is
reasonable number.
We introduce the gateway moves discretely and
will be in one location for a fixed time duration
called round r and during that time any one gate
way acts as aggregate node. The responsibility of
aggregate node is scheduled among the gate ways
and the selection is based on the LEACH mechanism.
This proposed method can lead to node energy
consumption balance and extend overall network
lifetime without performance degradation. To
increase the network life time the proposed algorithm
uses a probability function while considering use of
node residual energy for selection of gateways to
aggregate the data along with cluster head.
T(n) =

E
* res * L(n) ,
1
(1 P)*(r
*mod( )) Einit
t
Pt
Pt

T(n) = 0,

otherwise

if nG

(1)

and

L(n) = Min(

L(G j )

L(G
j =1

1. In configuration phase
Each gateway generates a random
probability (p) at
beginning of a new
round and computes threshold value T(n)
with the use of equation(1). If r = 1 ( The
first round), let Emax of all nodes and load
be 1.
In case of P<Pt the gateway
selected act as aggregate node and
router.

The
selected gateway
broadcasts
an
advertised message over neighbor nodes
and gateways.
The neighbor nodes collect advertised
messages during a given time interval and
then send a Join_Req message to the
nearest gateway.
The each gateway receives the Join_Req
messages and builds the group member list
and TDMA
At the a start of frame Fi every node
computes next mobility state information (a,
Fi+1) and is send to gateway header.
The gateway broadcast the next mobility
state information to all its member nodes
and save the message for data transfer.

(2)
2.

Where Pt is the desired percentage of cluster

head and aggregator , r is the current round number,
G is the set of gate way that have not been act as
aggregator in the last 1/Pt rounds. Er is the current

Volume 5 Number 2

energy and Em is the initial energy of the gate way.

The round r is defined as r = k * t where t= is the
frame time and k>1 an integer variable. L(Gj) is the
load of current gateway and L(n) is the minimum
load percentage of gateways. T(n) is the thresh hold
value
computed using the equation (1) for the
selection of gateway to act as aggregate node and
router. Also when the gateway moves to new
location, it only notifies its new location to all nodes.
This approach reduces the delay and save energy of
nodes and when nodes are moved, the nodes will
broadcast its location, next mobility state information
along with data.
A round consist of three phases: 1) a
configuration phase 2) data aggregation phase 3)
setup phase. The first stage is for configuring the
head and router gateway and the second stage is data
transfer along with predicted mobility state
information to the gateway and the last stage is
computation of
residual energy and load of
gateways needed for next computation of T(n).
The algorithm work as follows:

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In the data aggregation phase

Each member node sends data, predicted
state information and residual energy to the
head by given TDMA schedule.
Each gateway sends the current load to the
router to compute the load balance.

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Ubiquitous Computing and Communication Journal

Head

maintains

the

residual energy
information of member node and router
maintains load information of gateways.
3.

In setup phase
Before last frame of a round completes the
head sends router the maximum residual
energy value of nodes belongs to its own
group.

Router collects all maximum

residual
energy values from heads, finds the
maximum residual energy values (Emax) of
the network, and sends E max back to
group head.

The
Emax
header/ gateway broadcast
over group nodes.

Each node save the value of Emax

for the
next computation of T(n) and the gateway
save the L(Gi) for the next computation of
L(n) in turn calculate T(n).

At the end of current round the

SYN signal
is broadcast to all nodes in the group for
synchronization and current round is
terminated.

6. ENVIRONMENTAL
SYSTEM: DWMSN-EMS

MONITORING

The Environment sensing is usually done using a

few reading stations spread around cities. The data
like temperature, humidity, air pollution, wind speed
etc are measured form various locations at
reasonable cost and send to concerned office for
compilation at fixed time interval. We proposed a
new idea that makes the integration of sensor
networks, cellular networks and mesh networks
enables information exchange across the multiple
networks.

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It can be used along with Software tools that can be

developed for users in cellular networking
environment to collect the data about the
environmental factors [5,12]. Such information are
collected from various mobile users from different
location and are forward to servers. DWMSN
transmit the sensed data in long distance and reliable
way to the centralized severs and internet through
powerful base stations.
This kind of enormous information collection
about the environment is not possible in the
traditional way. Also the information are
immediately forwarded to centralized server and
processed and enhance the decision making based on
these data are quick, reliable and dynamic. This
application brings tremendous benefits to customer.
These kinds of functions cannot be accomplished by
any other existing networks. The self forming, self
healing and battery operable attributes of DWMSN
make it ideal for environmental monitoring
applications in a wide range of facilities.
The proposed idea/concept is to study using
sensors that sample the air and send data to a
persons cell phone via a Bluetooth link and to
central server. By using GPS signals, we can have
real-time traffic monitoring, pollution monitoring
and weather conditions in particular locations. We
propose to interface various environment sensors
into cell phones. Everyday cell phone users will
measure environmental data like temperature, wind
speed, humidity, and air pollution levels and
transmits them to local servers/gateways. This would
give researchers thousands of mobile sensors
gathering rich sets of local data at almost no cost.
Thus combining GPS
with sensed data will be
making the people as Digital object people.

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6.1 DWMSN EMS Prototype

REFERENCES

The processing steps involved in the proposed

EMS using DWMSN architecture are given below.

In first section the input signal is

transduced
and signal conditioned.

The acquired samples are

preprocessed (ie)
averaging the measurements and the results
are sent through serial interfaces to the
embedded systems that performs the final
processing and transmission of data and
final storage at local server.

The required data (ie) Output is

published
on demand through one or more interface
connected to the system.
The benefits of using DWMSN in this type of
application include:
1.
2.
3.

Easy installation.
Scalable and cost-effective.
Flexibility.

7. CONCLUSION
ENHANCEMENT:

AND

FUTURE

In future ubiquitous environment the individual

tiny wireless sensors may be mobile in nature. We
developed an algorithm and it will adopt the mobility
of sink and node and will maintain the dynamic
change of topology in wireless sensor networks
without degrading the performance in terms energy
efficient, delay and data transmission. The
deployment of mesh gateways in sensor networks
makes it possible the integration of multiple
heterogeneous networks which enables the
information exchange across multiple networks.
We proposed a new idea that makes the
integration of sensors with mobile or cell phone and
wireless mesh network to collect the environmental
data and transmit the data along with location
information to the local servers. The DWMSN is an
unique application that transmit the sensed data in
long distance and reliable way to the centralized
severs and internet through powerful base stations.
we proposed a design of prototype model for the
above application.
Further, we propose the implementation of EMS
for distributed measurement system published
through Web Service as our next future enhancement.
The output of the EMS is available in the Web for
the user and then this system offers great possibility
in terms of fast and easy access to measured data, of
integration of large complex Web Sensor Networks,
of realization, of flexible custom applications and of
service reusability.

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