A randomized energy-conservation protocol for resilient sensor networks*

In this paper we present PEAS, a randomized energy-conservation protocol that seeks to build resilient sensor networks in the presence of frequent, unexpected node failures. PEAS extends the network lifetime by maintaining a necessary set of working nodes and turning off redundant ones, which wake up after randomized sleeping times and replace failed ones when needed. The fully localized operations of PEAS are based on each individual node's observation of its local environment but do not require per neighbor state at any node; this allows PEAS to scale to very dense node deployment. PEAS is highly robust against node failures due to its simple operations and randomized design; it also ensures asymptotic connectivity. Our simulations and analysis show that PEAS can maintain an adequate working node density in presence of as high as 38% node failures, and a roughly constant overhead of less than 1% of the total energy consumption under various deployment densities. It extends a sensor network's functioning time in linear proportional to the deployed sensor population. Fan Ye received his B.E. in Automatic Control in 1996 and M.S. in Computer Science in 1999, both from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2004 from UCLA. He is currently with IBM Research. His research interests are in wireless networks, sensor networks and security. Honghai Zhang received his BS in Computer Science in 1998 from University of Science and Technology of China. He received his MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently with the Wireless Advanced Technology Lab of Lucent Technologies. His research interests are wireless networks, WiMAX, and VoIP over wireless networks. Songwu Lu received both his M.S. and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently an associate professor at UCLA Computer Science. He received NSF CAREER award in 2001. His research interests include wireless networking, mobile computing, wireless security, and computer networks. Lixia Zhang received her Ph.D in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center before joining the faculty of UCLA’s Computer Science Department in 1995. In the past she has served on the Internet Architecture Board, Co-Chair of IEEE Communication Society Internet Technical Committee, the editorial board for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and technical program committees for many networking-related conferences including SIGCOMM and INFOCOM. Zhang is currently serving as the vice chair of ACM SIGCOMM. Jennifer C. Hou received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). Prior to joining UIUC, she has taught at Ohio State University and University of Wisconsin - Madison. Dr. Hou has worked in the the areas of network modeling and simualtion, wireless-enabled software infrastructure for assisted living, and capacity optimization in wireless networks. She was a recipient of an ACM Recognition of Service, a Cisco University Research Award, a Lumley Research Award from Ohio State University, and a NSF CAREER award. ^*A Shorter version of this paper appeared in ICDCS 2003.