A New Robust, Energy-efficient and Scalable Wireless Sensor Networks Architecture Applied to a Wireless Fire Detection System

Abstract

In this work a new architecture called EDETA (Energy-efficient aDaptive hiErarchical and robusT Architecture) optimized to save node’s power is presented. This architecture is scalable and suitable for heterogeneous and homogeneous wireless sensor networks, supports single or multiple sinks, and also provides features increasely-demanded in the current applications such as fault tolerance and bounded-time response communications. All these features make EDETA suitable for the implementation of safety applications such as a wireless fire detection system. The proposed protocol is able to auto-configure, and it is based on two-levels hieratical architecture. The lower level is based on cluster organization, while the upper one is formed as a dynamic tree of clusters heads to send the data to the sink. A wireless fire detection system based on EDETA has been implemented, obtaining very satisfactory results about the reliability, response time and the consumption, the implemented system based on EDETA reduce the energy consumption in a factor of 8x compared with most popular power-aware protocols. Furthermore, EDETA multiplies the lifetime of the sensor network while providing, in addition, extra-features such as fault-tolerant mechanisms and bounded time.