An integrated framework for wireless sensor network management

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have significant potential in many application domains, ranging from precision agriculture and animal welfare to home and office automation. Although sensor network deployments have only begun to appear, the industry still awaits the maturing of this technology to realize its full benefits. The main constraints to large-scale commercial adoption of WSN have been the lack of available network management and control tools, such as for determining the degree of data aggregation prior to transforming it into useful information, localizing the sensors accurately so that timely emergency actions can be taken at an exact location, routing data by reducing sensor energy consumption, and scheduling data packets so that data are sent according to their priority and fairness. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no integrated network management solution comprising efficient localization, data scheduling, routing, and data aggregation approaches exists in the literature for a large-scale WSN. Thus, we introduce an integrated network management framework comprising sensor localization, routing, data scheduling, and data aggregation for a large-scale WSN. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms an existing approach that comprises only localization and routing protocols in terms of localization energy consumption, localization error, end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, and network energy consumption. Moreover, the proposed WSN management framework has potential in building a future "Internet of Things". Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.