Global Snapshot of a Large Wireless Sensor Network

A global snapshot of a distributed system reveals many facts including health of the system, integrity constraint violations and energy map etc. Specifically, in a wireless sensor network, global snapshot can be used to create an energy map of the whole network. Energy map can be defined as the aggregated information of residual energy of nodes present in the network. Such a map helps in predicting behavior of the network. Wireless sensor networks have peculiar characteristics which obstruct the use of traditional snapshot algorithm designed mainly for traditional distributed systems. Moreover, these algorithms are not scalable for large networks which have huge communication loss and message overhead. In this paper, we address this problem and formulate an algorithm for acquiring a global snapshot of large wireless network by dividing the network into concentric zones and adopting a zone wise state collection approach. Thus, with the help of concentric network topology and global snapshot, energy map is formed. We simulate this approach on Omnet++ and state network overhead and energy spent in capturing snapshot. The performance analysis of the proposed approach is done by comparing it with reliable and efficient snapshot algorithm for wireless sensor networks.