Towards Multiservice Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have been used in many applications such as health monitoring, structural monitoring, transportation networks, weather prediction, and border security. In most of these applications, sensors are used to report single phenomena/feature from the monitored field. This reporting is usually done frequently; however, the characteristics of the monitored field might not frequently change. On the other hand, there are some new types of smart sensors that can report multiple features (services) such as reporting temperature and humidity at the same time. We call such sensors as “multiservice sensors”. Using multiservice sensors in reporting to a centralized base station (sink node) and/or frequently report the field features generates a huge number of messages to be transmitted through the network; certainly this becomes worth in dense multi hop networks. In this paper, we propose a framework for single and multiservice sensor networks that is based on the idea of reporting only when there is a reasonable change in the monitored phenomena. Our framework is applicable for multipurpose sensor networks as well. The framework is tested against the flooding protocol and showed a considerable enhancement in prolonging the sensor network lifetime and saving sensors energy.