On the self-healing properties of an extremely low power indoor metering network

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consisting of a large number of tiny inexpensive sensor nodes are a viable solution for many problems in the field of building automation. In order to meet the energy constraints, the nodes have to operate according to an extremely low duty cycle schedule. Based on an earlier proposal for efficiently bootstrapping and configuring such a network, we show how this algorithm can be extended in order to also resolve error conditions, e.g. synchronization loss, during normal network operation and to automatically maintain an optimized network topology. Simulation studies using different error scenarios and network models show that the extended algorithm automatically adapts the network topology to the given conditions and in fact maintains an optimized network topology at reasonable energy cost. © 2008 IEEE.