Networks of small wireless sensor devices, ...
Title: Energy conservation techniques for wireless sensor networks
Technological advances during the last few years allowed the development of new and cheap sensors equiped with wireless communication which can be configured to form autonomous networks. The application areas for wireless sensor networks (WSN) are various: home automations, health care services, military domain, and environment monitoring. The imposed constraints are limited capacity of processing, storage, and especially energy. In addition, implementing WSN solutions is highly open and requires that the infrastructure, the mechanisms and the protocols should be completely designed based on each specific application.In this thesis, we first focused on small networks. We designed « Placide », a protocol stack solution for cold chain monitoring proposed within the ANR-CAPTEURS project. The first originality of this solution is based on the absence of infrastructure and base stations. « Placide » is composed of self-organizing and energy-efficient protocols based on a virtual ring construction between nodes. The second topic is devoted to an experimental study on Link Quality Indicator (LQI). There are two main objectives. Firstly, we want to endorse our precise assumptions of the first part of the work. Secondly, our poposed link quality based protocols and algorithms willbe described. We focused on LQI variations according to distance between nodes and transmission power.Thereafter, the impact of LQI on the network topology has been studied. Feedbacks are important to understand which factors affect the network lifetime. The last contribution relates to the use of these observations by proposing load balancing strategies. Our idea is that very reduced protocols and simple mechanisms can be used in routing protocols. We illustrate these principles through simple examples where we show the superiority of these solutions compared to standard routing like shortest path for example.
This research is supported by the ``Capteurs" grant, a National Telecommunication Research Network project. It is the French National Research and Innovation Programme for Telecommunication.