SenMetrics 2005 1

Towards Efficient Routing in

Wireless Sensor Networks

Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Autonomous Networks Research Group
Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
http://ceng.usc.edu/~anrg

2
Talk Overview
We will examine the modeling and analysis of three
different aspects of information routing that are of
particular concern to wireless sensor networks:

1. Joint routing and in-network compression
- minimize total number of bits transmitted
2. Low latency routing with sleep schedules
minimize end to end latency, given duty cycle
3. Robust geographic routing over real wireless links
maximize delivery ratio and energy efficiency

This work has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants CNS-0435505, CNS-
0347621, CNS-0325875, and CCF-0430061
3
1. Impact of Spatial Correlation
on Routing with Compression
Pattem, Krishnamachari, Govindan, Impact of Spatial Correlation on
Routing with Compression in Wireless Sensor Networks, IPSN 2004.
[Best Student Paper Award]
Minimizing the total number of bit transmissions
4
Spatial Correlation Model




Inter-node
spacing d
Correlation
level c
Number of
nodes n
Entropy of
single source H
1

A parameterized expression for the joint entropy of n linearly placed equally spaced nodes
5
Comparison of Basic Strategies




Routing Driven Compression: route
along shortest paths to sink,
compress wherever paths happen to
overlap

Compression Driven Routing: Route
to maximize compression, though this
may incur longer paths

Distributed Source Coding (ideal):
perform distributed compression at
sources, and route along shortest
paths. If we ignore costs of learning
correlation, this provides an idealized
lower bound.

6
Comparison of Basic Strategies




7
Analysis




Consider a linear set of sources, in a 2D grid. Data from s nodes is
compressed first before routing to the sink.

We can derive expressions for the energy cost as a function of the cluster
size s:





We can even derive an expression for the optimal cluster size as a function
of the network size and correlation level:
8
Cluster-based routing + compression




Suggests the existence of a near-optimal cluster (about 15) that is insensitive to correlation level!
9
Near-Optimal Clustering




Can formalize the notion of near-optimality using a maximum difference
metric:


We can then derive an expression for the near-optimal cluster size:





This is independent of the correlation level, but does depend on the network
size, number of sources, and location of the sink. For the above scenario, it
turns out s
no
= 14 (which explains the results shown).
10
Near-Optimal Clustering




11
Summary




These results (further extended to 2D scenarios in recent work) indicate that
a simple, non-adaptive, cluster-based routing and compression strategy is
robust and efficient.




12
2. Low Latency Routing with Sleep
Lu, Sadagopan, Krishnamachari, Goel Delay Efficient Sleep Scheduling
in Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Infocom 2005.
Minimizing end to end latency, given duty cycle
13
Sleep Latency
Largest source of energy consumption is keeping the radio on (even if idle).
Particularly wasteful in low-data-rate applications.

Solution: regular duty-cycled sleep-wakeup cycles. E.g. S-MAC

Another Problem: increased latency


1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
time
14
Special Case Solution: D-MAC
Gang Lu, Bhaskar Krishnamachari and Cauligi Raghavendra, "An Adaptive Energy-Efficient and Low-
Latency MAC for Data Gathering in Sensor Networks," IEEE WMAN 2004.
Staggered sleep wake cycles minimize latency for one-way data gathering.
15
General Problem Formulation
Each node is assigned one slot out of k to be an active reception slot which
is advertised to all neighbors that may have to transmit to it.

Nodes sleep on all other slots unless they have a packet to transmit.

Assume low traffic so that only sleep latency is dominant and there is low
interference/contention.

The per-hop sleep delay is the difference between reception slots of
neighboring nodes

Data between any pair of nodes is routed on lowest-delay path between
them (arbitrary communication patterns possible)

Goal: assign slots to nodes to minimize the worst case end to end delay
(delay diameter)



16
DESS Problem Formulation
Given a graph G, assign one of k
reception slots to each node to
minimize the maximum (shortest-
cost-path) delay between any
two points in the network
17
NP-Hardness
18

Although problem is NP-hard in general, can derive optimal
solutions for some special cases with structure

Tree: alternate between 0 and k/2. Gives worst delay diameter of
dk/2







Ring: sequential slot assignment has best possible delay diameter
of (1 - 1/k)*n







A constant factor approximation can be obtained in case of the
square grid by using the solution for the ring as a building block
Special Cases: Tree, Ring
0
1
2
0
1
2
2
0
1
19
Special Case: Grid







A solution for the grid is to use an arrangement of concentric rings
Can prove that this provides a constant factor approximation
20
Comparison of Heuristics
21
Multi-Schedule Solutions
If each node is allowed to adopt multiple schedules, then can find
much more efficient solutions:

Grid: delay diameter of at most d + 8k (create four cascading
schedules at each node, one for each direction)

Tree: delay diameter of at most d+4k (create two schedules at each
node, one for each direction)

On general graphs can obtain a O( (d + k)log n) approximation for
the delay diameter
22
Summary




Sleep schedules should be intelligently designed to enable low-latency
routing

Ongoing work looks at adaptively assigning these schedules depending on
current flows in the network (rather than worst-case over all possible flows)




23
3. Geographic Routing on
Real Wireless Links
Seada, Zuniga, Helmy, Krishnamachari, Energy-Efficient Forwarding
Strategies for Geographic Routing in Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks, ACM
Sensys 2004.
Li, Hsu, Krishnamachari, Helmy, A Local Metric for Geographic Routing
with Power Control in Wireless Networks, IEEE SECON 2005, to appear.

Zuniga, Krishnamachari, Analyzing the Transitional Region in Low-
Power Wireless Links, IEEE SECON 2004.
Maximizing delivery ratio and energy efficiency
24
Recent Empirical Observations
Ganesan et al. [TR 02], Zhao [SenSys 03], Woo [Sensys 03], Cerpa
[TR 04].

Wireless Links show three regions : connected, transitional, and
disconnected.

Transitional region is characterized by
Asymmetric links.
High variance space/time.
High sensitivity to HW
25
Channel & Radio Models
Exponential path loss with log-
normal variation due to multi-
path fading.
PRR(SNR) depends on
modulation, encoding and packet
size.
26
Explanation of Observation
distance (m)
r
e
c
e
i
v
e
d

p
o
w
e
r

(
d
B
m
)

Observations
TR
TR
27
Empirical Evaluation
Indoor Environment: aisle of building (3.0, 3.8)
empirical
model
med pw high pw
Realistic wireless topology generators available at http://ceng.usc.edu/~anrg/
28
Empirical Evaluation
Outdoor Environment: football field (4.7, 4.6)
med pw high pw
empirical
model
Realistic wireless topology generators available at http://ceng.usc.edu/~anrg/
29
Implications for Geographic Routing
30
Two Extremes
1. Forward to best-distance improvement neighbor
Pro: fewer total hops
Con: each long hop likely to have low packet reception rate (PRR), hence, may
need many retries to get packet across each hop.

2. Forward to nearby neighbor in direction of destination
Pro: each hop is likely to be high PRR, hence energy-efficient
Con: Requires more total hops, since only a short distance is traveled at each
step


31
The PRR*D metric


The product of link reception rate and distance improvement provides
a local metric that balances the two concerns.
32
Evaluation of PRR*d


33
Summary




For robust performance, routing approaches suitable for sensor networks
must carefully take into account realistic wireless link conditions.

Newer work (to appear in SECON 05) looks at extending results to the case
of robust geographic routing with power control with a slightly modified local
metric: PRR*d/(power) , with power level and PRR selected at each hop to
optimize energy efficiency.



34
Conclusions




We examined how to make wireless sensor network routing techniques
more efficient, in three different contexts:

when performing in-network compression while gathering correlated information
to save energy

when minimizing the latency induced by radio sleep schedules

when routing using local geographic information, over real wireless links with loss


A major research goal for the future is to determine whether these and other
such optimizations can be unified under a single routing architecture that
would be suitable for a sufficiently large set of applications