WSN in cyber physical systems: Enhanced energy management routing approach using software agents

Recently, the cyber physical system has emerged as a promising direction to enrich the interactions between physical and virtual worlds. Meanwhile, a lot of research is dedicated to wireless sensor networks as an integral part of cyber physical systems. A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices that use sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions. These autonomous devices, or nodes, combine with routers and a gateway to create a typical WSN system. Shrinking size and increasing deployment density of wireless sensor nodes implies the smaller equipped battery size. This means emerging wireless sensor nodes must compete for efficient energy utilization to increase the WSN lifetime. The network lifetime is defined as the time duration until the first sensor node in a network fails due to battery depletion. One solution for enhancing the lifetime of WSN is to utilize mobile agents. In this paper, we propose an agent-based approach that performs data processing and data aggregation decisions locally i.e., at nodes rather than bringing data back to a central processor (sink). Our proposed approach increases the network lifetime by generating an optimal routing path for mobile agents to transverse the network. The proposed approach consists of two phases. In the first phase, Dijkstra’s algorithm is used to generate a complete graph to connect all source nodes in a WSN. In the second phase, a genetic algorithm is used to generate the best-approximated route for mobile agents in a radio harsh environment to route the sensory data to the base-station. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, a formal analysis and experimental results are presented. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.