Into the SMOG: The Stepping Stone to Centralized WSN Control

Previous research has shown that centralized network control in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can lead to improved network lifetime, benefit reliability, help to diagnose and localize network failures, assist network recovery, and lead to optimal routing and transmission scheduling. A stepping stone to centralized network control is to build and maintain a complete network topology model that scales and reacts to the network dynamics that occur in low-power wireless networks. We propose SMOG as a mechanism to build and maintain a centralized full network topology model using probabilistic data structures. Extensive analysis of the proposed approach in both simulation and two testbeds shows that SMOG can build a complete model of a WSN of over 100 nodes with 98% accuracy in less than four minutes. Our approach also offers fast recovery from heavy network interference, recovering model accuracy to 98% in less than two and a half minutes.