IRS: application reconfiguration scheme for wireless sensor networks

Application reconfiguration is essential to achieving flexibility and adaptability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) used in environment monitoring. In this paper, we present an integrated reconfiguration scheme (IRS) for implementing environment adaptive application reconfiguration (EAAR) in WSNs. In our scheme, application reconfiguration is implemented with the push-based paradigm for densely distributed nodes and the cluster-based hybrid reconfiguration (CHR) paradigm for sparsely distributed nodes. We demonstrate the energy-efficiency and scalability of our scheme by analyzing the energy consumption based on a randomly deployed sensor network. Moreover, we derive the density threshold of reconfiguration nodes (RNs) for determining if the nodes are densely or sparsely distributed, and choose the mode of operation for IRS. We use extensive simulation experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.