Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks: Architects for Pervasive Computing

Abstract

Mobile enabled Wireless Sensor Network (mWSN) has been proposed to realize large-scale information gathering via wireless networking and mobile sinks. Through theoretical analysis it is established that by learning the mobility pattern of mobile sinks, char d based multi hop clustering scheme can forward the packets to the estimated sink positions in a timely and most energy-efficient way. Besides, the less strict the packet deadline is, the more energy saving is achieved. In addition, the mobility’s influence on the performance of single-hop clustering has been investigated. It is found that sink mobility can reduce the energy consumption level, and further lengthen the network lifetime. However, its side effects are the increased message delivery delay and outage probability. The same problems will remain by tuning the sink density or coverage (i.e. sink amount and transmission range), so the conclusion is that sink mobility and sink density are permutable, since sink mobility increase its spatial redundancy similar with deploying multiple sinks. In this chapter, we have further presented multi-tier architecture for the mobile wireless sensor network as a key element of future ubiquitous computing paradigm. The multi-tier architecture has been discussed in previous research for traditional wireless sensor network; however we consider the multi-tier architecture in mobile WSN, with a special emphasis on integration into a pervasive network. The detailed architectural implementation is presented in this chapter, followed by an analysis of the impact of mobility on performance related issues in WSN. The hierarchical multi tiered architecture is believed to perform efficiently and is also scalable to large network size. We have further discussed some of the future application scenarios for this ubiquitous computing age along with a description of some of the related existing technologies which play a significant role in the proposed architecture.