ASCENT: Adaptive Self-Configuring Sensor Networks Topologies

Alberto Cerpa, Deborah Estrin

Abstract

Advances in micro-sensor and radio technology will enable small but smart sensors to be deployed for a wide range of environmental monitoring applications. The low per-node cost will allow these wireless networks of sensors and actuators to be densely distributed. The nodes in these dense networks will coordinate to perform the distributed sensing and actuation tasks. Moreover, as described in this paper, the nodes can also coordinate to exploit the redundancy provided by high density, so as to extend overall system lifetime. The large number of nodes deployed in these systems will preclude manual configuration, and the environmental dynamics will preclude design-time pre-configuration. Therefore, nodes will have to self-configure to establish a topology that provides communication under stringent energy constraints. ASCENT builds on the notion that as density increases, only a subset of the nodes are necessary to establish a routing forwarding backbone. In ASCENT, each node assesses its connectivity and adapts its participation in the multi-hop network topology based on the measured operating region. This paper motivates and describes the ASCENT algorithm and presents analysis, simulation and experimental measurements. We show that the system achieves linear increase in energy savings as a function of the density and the convergence time required in case of node failures while still providing adequate connectivity.

Availability

PDF

Reference

Alberto Cerpa, Deborah Estrin, "ASCENT: Adaptive Self-Configuring Sensor Networks Topologies," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review, 32, (1), pp. 62--62, January, 2002.

Bibtex

@Article{Cerpa02a,
  author =       "Alberto Cerpa and Deborah Estrin",
  title =        "{ASCENT}: Adaptive Self-Configuring Sensor Networks
                 Topologies",
  journal =      "ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review",
  year =         "2002",
  volume =       "32",
  pages =        "62--62",
  number =       "1",
  month =        jan,
  note =         "Abstract of the poster accepted in SIGCOMM 2001
                 conference",
  URL =          "http://www.andes.ucmerced.edu/papers/Cerpa02a.pdf",
  cited =        "144",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2002 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial purposes. New copies must bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.