Analyzing the performance of a self organizing framework for wireless sensor-actuator networks

Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) refer to a group of sensors and actuators linked by a wireless medium to perform distributed sensing and acting tasks. In order to provide effective sensing and acting, coordination mechanisms are required among sensors and actuators. We have presented the architectural design of a self organizing coordination framework in [3]. The framework organizes the two-tiered heterogeneous network into clusters. The coordination framework is a three-level coordination protocol and the three levels belong to the three types of coordination required for WSANs: sensor-sensor coordination, sensoractuator coordination and actuator-actuator coordination. In WSANs (or WSNs), the routing protocol is highly influenced by the operating application with delay and energy consumption constraints. Therefore, we propose to decouple the application dependent coordination dynamics from the essentials provided by the routing protocol. In this paper, we present the performance analysis of our proposal called ADP (Actuator Discovery Protocol) for static and mobile WSANs. Using ns-2 simulation results we have shown to eliminate redundancy at each coordination level to make routing effective and fault-tolerant.