Application placement with shared monitoring points in multi-purpose IoT wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The main function of a wireless sensor network (WSN) is to gather data from a certain region and transfer the data to a center or remote locations for further processing. The collected data can be of interest for many applications. Therefore, a physical WSN owned by a single provider can be utilized by many customer applications. Additionally, the data of a particular point or sub-region can satisfy the need of multiple applications. Hence, sensing the data only once in such cases is beneficial to reduce the energy consumption, network traffic and acceptance ratio of the applications. We call this as monitoring point based shared data approach. In this paper, we focus on the placement of applications each of which requires several points to be monitored in an area a WSN covers. We first propose such a monitoring point based shared data approach for WSNs that will serve multiple dynamic applications. We also propose two methods for application placement over a shared physical WSN: one greedy method and one genetic algorithm based method called GABAP. We did extensive simulation experiments to evaluate our algorithms. The results show the effectiveness of our methods in fast and close-to-optimum placement of applications over a single network.