Delay and energy optimization in multilevel balanced WSNs for landslide monitoring

In most of the real world wireless sensor network deployments, the energy utilization is a critical factor as the nodes are battery powered. In most of the real-world deployments it is observed that the sensing subsystem consumes higher power. In order to extend the lifetime of such systems it is required to reduce the sensing energy than communication energy. We have deployed a system for monitoring Landslides in India consists of 150 geo-physical sensors and used solar panels to power these sensor nodes. The decision making in favor of Landslide occurrence is based on the maximum values obtained from the high priority sensors. As this maximum value is not frequently changing in the deployment, locating the sensor node with maximum value allows us to switch off the other sensors for a predetermined period of time. This work proposes an optimal balanced network topology for delay minimization by parallelizing data aggregation operation in each sub-network. The sensor node switch off schemes on the top of delay minimized topology enables the optimal utilization of the available solar power. The analysis of these mechanisms shows that, more number of nodes can be powered with the available source of energy and can increase the network life time