Simulating large wireless sensor networks using radio-triggered cellular architecture

A wireless sensor network is an ad hoc network in which the nodes can sense, actuate, compute and communicate with each other. Sensor networks can be used in many applications, such as environmental monitoring and industrial applications. Despite their potential applications, such networks have resource restrictions, such as low computational power, reduced bandwidth and specially limited power source. Real world wireless sensor networks infrastructures are still very expensive and hard to implement. Therefore, most of the evaluations of new protocols are being made through simulation tools. The objective of this work is to apply a power management technique to prolong the life time of sensor networks. Power management protocols employ wake-up/sleep schedules. We present power management scheme that eliminates wake-up periods. This type of wake-up capability is enabled by a radio-triggered hardware component inspired by the observation that the wake-up radio signal contains enough energy to trigger a wake-up process. A simulator has been developed to solve the topology control problem by dividing the network into cells. The solution presented is based on the geographical position and the operational states of sensors. The results indicate that radio triggered cellular architecture can increase the life time of large wireless sensor networks.