FuzDeMa: A portable fuzzy-based decision-making tool for reliable communication in wireless underground sensor networks

The deployment and the exploitation of a Wireless Underground Sensor Network (WUSN) remain challenging because of signal attenuation in the soil and the limited battery that powers the sensor nodes. Due to the attenuation of the signal in the ground, the reception or loss of the sent data depends on the ground conditions, which can change dynamically. However, in existing WUSNs, each node sends the data collected in each round regardless of the signal attenuation. It is well demonstrated that sensor nodes consume the most energy during transmission. Obviously, transmission without receiving any data significantly reduces the lifetime of a sensor node useless. This paper presents a novel fuzzy-based decision-making solution called FuzDeMa that reduces energy consumption by anticipating data losses before transmission. To do so, FuzDeMa assesses in real time the loss or the reception of a packet according to the in-situ node's environments before its transmission and decides whether to send or not the packet based on the computed reliability. To validate the proposed approach, we embed it into a dedicated underground node called the MoleNet and realized real experimentations firstly with an existing dataset and secondly, with precision-measuring equipment to estimate the energy consumption. The results revealed the possibility of prolonging the lifetime of the sensor node by saving up to 81.7876 microjoules in a single round. Additionally, FuzDeMa shows the ability to save energy for up to 46 of additional revolutions, thus extending the life of the sensor node to 32.85% for 140 real transmission cycles. An analytical generalization of FuzDeMa is provided regardless of a specific dataset or sensor node. Thus, we provided the conditions for a random dataset to save the energy with any sensor node that implements FuzDeMa during transmissions.