Communication Scheme Independent of Publishers and Subscribers for Large-Scale Sensor Applications

Typical information communication for large-scale wireless sensor networks may be performed in a data-centric routing manner. The data-centric routing manner well matches the publish/subscribe communication paradigm operated by a contention-based networking. The publish/subscribe paradigm provides decoupling properties for data-centric networking: space, time, and synchronization decoupling. For large-scale applications in which many publishers and subscribers are participated in interworking of information, the decoupling properties proffer salability. However, most existing communication schemes for the large-scale sensor networks do not fully satisfy the decoupling properties. The schemes construct network structures based on publishers or subscribers known as event sources and sinks respectively. Such dependency of network structures causes that network structures are established in proportion to the number of sinks or sources, i.e. space dependency. Also, originating sinks or sources of structures are always joined with the structures and manage the interworking information, i.e. dependency of time and synchronization. Hence, the communication schemes should take into account a network structure independent of the publishers and subscribers. In this paper, we propose a novel communication scheme decoupled with sinks and event sources, called ARBITER. ARBITER constructs a shared virtual grid with level value k from center point, k = 0. It then arranges storage nodes and transit nodes at level 1 cross points and over level points respectively. Sinks query to the storage nodes through the transit nodes and receive interesting information via requesting paths. Sources store sensed data to the storage nodes by the transit nodes. Our simulation proves that ARBITER shows better performance in terms of scalability, data responsibility, and mobility support.