An Intelligent Safety-Aware Gateway Relocation Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have received enormous attentions due to their potential use in many applications. They can be used to enrich our understanding of natural events, such as earthquakes and volcanoes, and to increase the efficiency of surveillance operations in secure installation, border control and military reconnaissance. Sensors are placed in harsh environments to collect and deliver data to a central node, called the gateway. The gateway analyzes the received data and decides on appropriate actions. Therefore, protecting the gateway is critical for ensuring the robustness of WSN. Since the location of the gateway significantly affects the efficiency of the network operation, many research have been conducted for the gateway placement problem. However, most of the proposed solutions are geared for boosting network-related performance metrics, such as throughput and energy consumption. We argue that relocating without taking safety concerns into consideration may cause the gateway to move dangerously close to one or multiple serious events in the environment. In this paper, we present GRENN, a new algorithm for gateway relocation in wireless sensor networks considering both the network performance and the gateway safety. Our experimental validation has demonstrated the effectiveness of GRENN in protecting the gateway while keeping the performance at an acceptable level.