Motivation

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are commonly used in multiple different scenarios, such as smart agriculture, monitoring of installations or disaster management. Often they are used in deployments where access is either expensive (e.g., long distance, remote) or impossible (e.g., disaster regions), and are commonly running on battery power. Therefore, reducing energy-consumption is of utmost importance in order to prolong the battery life of the devices.

One possible area for opimization is the routing of data produced by the sensor nodes towards a sink. Sinks may be classified as either being static or mobile. A static sink has a fixed position, while a mobile sink might move around in the network or even might not be available at all at certain times. Commonly used routing solutions rely either on static sinks or on mobile sinks only. In this thesis, both types of sinks should be combined for increased energy efficiency.

In our scenario we assume a static sink to be always available, but reaching it may require multiple hops, thus consuming more energy. A mobile sink may be reached easier, but it may not be available everytime it is needed. Furthermore, contrary to the common use of mobile sinks, we assume that the mobile sink primarily fulfills another, unrelated task and collects the data only as a "byproduct" of this main task. The sensor nodes have to decide towards which sink to route the data based on multiple different parameters, such as battery level, latency requirements or filling levels of memory buffers.

Task Description

In this thesis, a routing algorithm for the scenario described above should be designed and implemented. This routing algorithm should factor in the peculiarities of the described scenario and should utilize them to achieve lowest possible energy consumption. The developed routing algorithm should then be compared to one or more established routing algorithms to find out strengths and weaknesses of the new algorithm. The evaluation should happen in the form of a simulation, preferably in ns-3, and should factor in multiple aspects, such as energy consumption, latency, etc.

The task might be done in English or in German.

Prerequisites

Required

• Good knowledge in C/C++
• Solid knowledge in computer networks

Recommended

• Experience working with WSNs
• Experience with network simulation