Multitiered and Distributed WSAN for Cooperative Indoors Environment Management

For the past decade, wireless sensor networks have focused primarily on data collection. As a result the network topology for these systems was usually heavily centralized. However, for these networks to form a full system, the introduction of proper actuation units and decision-making intelligence is inevitable. Such a new wireless sensor and actuator network system enables new architectural research issues that have not been previously studied. In this work, we introduce the DWSAN system architecture, which effectively combines both sensor and actuation hardware devices to a single network and manages this network so that the actuation decisions are made in a distributed manner and the topology of the network maintains a multitier architecture. Our intensive set of evaluations reveal that, compared to the centralized approach that has been used in most wireless sensor network systems until now, when actuation units are introduced to the system, the DWSAN architecture reduces the transmission load of the network and the actuation decision-making latency by close to twofold and threefold, respectively. Furthermore, we show that this benefit naturally leads to better scalability of the system, making it suitable for various sensing applications in different environments.