Ubiquitous sensor network management: The least interference beaconing model

Network management is revisited in the emerging ubiquitous sensor networks (USNs) that form the Internet-of-the-Things (IoT) with the objective of evaluating the impact of traffic engineering on energy efficiency and assessing if routing simplicity translates into scalability. USN management is formulated as a local optimization problem minimizing the number of traffic flows transiting by a node: the nodes traffic flow interference with other nodes. The least interference beaconing algorithm (LIBA) is proposed as an algorithmic solution to the problem, and the least interference beaconing protocol (LIBP) as its protocol implementation. LIBP extends the beaconing process widely used by collection protocols with load balancing to improve the USN energy efficiency. Simulation results reveal the relative efficiency of the resulting traffic engineering scheme compared to state of the art protocols. These results show up to 30% reduction in power consumption compared to TinyOS beaconing (TOB), and up to 40% compared to collection tree protocol (CTP) while sustaining better performance in terms of scalability.