Enhancing wireless networked monitoring system sustainability by multi-hop consensus algorithm

The widely studied consensus protocols have been increasingly used in industrial monitoring applications to support distributed process control. As the theoretical convergence rate covers vast interests in literature, techniques to speed up the convergence rate of consensus have been extensively explored, whereas their effects on the energetic consumption and on the sensor node technology have received a relatively lower attention. This work proposes to analyze jointly the energetic consumption and the consensus convergence rate in a Wireless Sensor Network scenario. Two different consensus techniques have been compared: the single-hop and the multi-hop algorithms. An environmental simulator has been built to validate the above techniques. Results show that multi-hop algorithm may be preferable to preserve the network lifetime, while the single-hop is more suitable in order to achieve higher speed of convergence.