Dynamic Concentric Rings Infrastructure for Efficient Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

The design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has a new paradigm that implies a separation of the underlying communication functionalities from the upper-layer protocols with the goal of leveraging the reusability of protocols. This paper provides an overview of the proposed Rings infrastructure protocol (RIP), which forms a generic flexible communication infrastructure. RIP discovers the physical topological rings that exist in an arbitrary WSN topology and produces an infrastructure of concentric rings (Rings) that reflects the physical rings of nodes in the field. The resulting infrastructure guarantees the proximity of nodes. Neighbor nodes in this logical overlay are also physical neighbors. Each ring in Rings is assigned one or more mobile robots that act as probes to access the data and monitor the ring. Access nodes are selected dynamically at each ring to act as anchors for the probes visiting their associated rings. The Rings infrastructure supports both multi-hop and data-mule communication models with a high degree of reliability. This paper focuses on creating the infrastructure: we justify its correctness and efficiency. A rough cost model that predicts the cost of communication over Rings is provided. The performance of the infrastructure is evaluated by implementing and simulating some of the upper-layer processes. Simulation-based comparisons with the multi-scale communication approach are provided, and the results show that the Rings infrastructure is both robust and efficient in supporting upper-layer processes.