A case for centrally controlled wireless sensor networks

In this article we present the Intelligent, Manageable, Power-Efficient and Reliable Internetworking Architecture (IMPERIA), a centrally managed architecture for large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We discuss the advantages of a centralized management over distributed approaches and derive our design by rigorously minimizing the amount of state information on individual sensor nodes and all sources of message collision during network operations. The result is a clustered multi-hop TDMA protocol that globally synchronizes the network and collects data at ultra-low power consumption.We present the end-to-end architecture and detail the algorithms we developed for (a) efficient network topology discovery and link quality estimation, (b) combined routing and clustering for pre-defined basestations, and (c) the scheduling of the medium access for multi-cluster and multi-channel data collection.IMPERIA has been implemented on TinyOS and IBM’s Mote Runner and successfully deployed in applications for vibration sensing as well as datacenter energy management. This article summarizes the performance results from simulations, laboratory experiments, and deployment measurements that support our design decisions.