Energy consumption optimization with Ichi Taguchi method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consists of sensor nodes for monitoring and reporting sensible changes on a field to a specific server. One of the applications of WSN is large area monitoring, where sensor nodes are placed in far fields with limited power sources. Due to the adhered reason, the energy consumption of sensor nodes is considered as one of the major challenge in WSN. Many factor in WSN contributes to energy consumption such as Medium Access Control protocol (MAC), the network topology, and routing protocol. With the variety of factors that affects the energy consumption in WSN; the challenge of optimizing WSN networks toward a low energy consumption is becoming a hard problem. In the literature many efforts are paid for designing, implementing, and improving protocols in terms of power consumption. However, few efforts are paid for optimizing the existing protocols and other network parameters toward a green technology. This paper focuses in WSN infrastructure and protocols optimization by introducing the Ichi Taguchi (Taguchi) optimization method. Taguchi method is used to predict the best design parameters to achieve optimal performance parameters. Moreover, Taguchi method is used to optimize the energy consumed by sensor nodes against network protocols and network topology design parameters. A simulation experiments are curried out on the discrete event simulator OMNET++ for the purposes of this research paper. The obtained results show the impact of the network protocols toward the energy consumption. Furthermore, a proposed network topology and protocols set is introduced, and compared against the existing once.