Designing Redundancy toward Building Easily Manageable Wireless Sensor Networks for Humans

The present paper proposes an architecture for collecting sensing data to build robust wireless sensor networks that are easily manageable by humans and evaluates the proposed architecture through simulations. Under the assumption that sensing data is collected from sensor nodes that have exhausted their batteries, we herein assume that the amount of sensing data that humans can analyze at once and that the number of sensor nodes that humans can recover at any given time are small. Furthermore, it is assumed that in an easily manageable network (1) a sensor network is fault-tolerant and can be sustained for a long time, (2) sensing data is obtained in real time, and (3) sensor nodes leave a sensor network dispersively in time. The proposed architecture first requires sensor nodes to leave a sensor network dispersively in time by utilizing innate differences among the sensor nodes in the frequency of sensing and communication and then collects sensing data from the leaving sensor nodes. Simulation results suggest that the proposed architecture with appropriate redundancy contributes to building more robust and easily manageable wireless sensor networks.