Data MULEs: modeling a three-tier architecture for sparse sensor networks

By Rahul C. Shah, Sumit Kumar Roy, Sushant Jain, Waylon Brunette. Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Sensor Network Protocols and Applications, 2003., 2003

1,518 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents and analyzes an architecture to collect sensor data in sparse sensor networks. Our approach exploits the presence of mobile entities (called MULEs) present in the environment. MULEs pick up data from the sensors when in close range, buffer it, and drop off the data to wired access points. This can lead to substantial power savings at the sensors as they only have to transmit over a short range. This paper focuses on a simple analytical model for understanding performance as system parameters are scaled. Our model assumes two-dimensional random walk for mobility and incorporates key system variables such as number of MULEs, sensors and access points. The performance metrics observed are the data success rate (the fraction of generated data that reaches the access points) and the required buffer capacities on the sensors and the MULEs. The modeling along with simulation results can be used for further analysis and provide certain guidelines for deployment of such systems.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0000233de254693ff6577c5e8d3bf15b456d72be

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

GeOpps: Geographical Opportunistic Routing for Vehicular Networks (2007, background): “There are a number of existing delay tolerant routing protocols ( [ 18 , 20, 17], etc) These protocols exploit different mechanisms to route a message to the destination such as statistics of previous encounters, or precise mobility schedules tofind the best routes.”
A Survey on Localization for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (2009, background): “In sparse networks, or when a node drops off the network, mobile nodes can position themselves to maintain network connectivity [16], [17].”
Using mobile relays to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (2005, methodology): “Shah et al.[8] proposed to use randomly moving ”Data Mules” to help gather the sensing data.”
Energy conservation in wireless sensor networks: A survey (2009, background): “To this end most of the solutions proposed in the literature embed a simple periodic wakeup scheme with an active period [64,71,114,119].”
Joint mobile energy replenishment and data gathering in wireless rechargeable sensor networks (2011, positive): “Based on this observation, several researchers [11]-[17] have proposed to use the mobile data collector to achieve uniform energy consumption.”
Making Sensor Networks Immortal: An Energy-Renewal Approach With Wireless Power Transfer (2012, background): “1063-6692/$31.00 &#169; 2012 IEEE We introduce the concept of renewable energy cycle where the remaining energy level in a sensor node s battery exhibits some periodicity over a time cycle.”
Routing in a delay tolerant network (2004, background): “A series of efforts [13, 22, 24, 5] in the context of sensor/mobile-adhoc networks looks into providing connectivity when topology dynamics are unknown.”
Node localization using mobile robots in delay-tolerant sensor networks (2005, methodology): “In this section, we review research most relevant to our work: 1) delay-tolerant sensor networks and 2) sensor network localization.”
Internet of things: Vision, applications and research challenges (2012, background): “Alternative architectures may make use of proximity communications whenever possible in case of large deployments; possible implementations are described in [82,83].”
Exploiting Mobility for Energy Efficient Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks (2006, methodology): “The idea of MULE architecture was introduced in our previous workshop paper along with a very simple analytical model [4].”
Evaluating Mobility Pattern Space Routing for DTNs (2005, background): “Some research projects such as Data Mules [23] or SeNTD [24] use mobile network elements to transport data from fixed sensors to a number of access points in an opportunistic fashion.”
Topology management techniques for tolerating node failures in wireless sensor networks: A survey (2014, background): “For example, in [108][109] the authors have proposed energy efficient data collection protocols in single-hop WSNs by employing data MULEs which are capable of short-range wireless communication and move in an uncoordinated manner to provide connectivity in sparse WSNs.”
Routing in Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks: A Taxonomy, Survey and Challenges (2013, background): “Date Mule [108] is capable of exchanging the message between the nearby sensor access point with random movement.”
Message ferry route design for sparse ad hoc networks with mobile nodes (2006, background): “Several schemes for routing in Sparse MANETs exist, for example, [1, 3, 5, 10, 11, 14, 16, 26, 21, 23, 24, 29].”