Hindawi Publishing Corporation
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Volume , Article ID , pages
http://dx.doi.org/.//
Research Article
Feature-Aware Cooperative Relaying for
Multiflow Wireless Sensor Networks
Ming Tao,
1
Huaqiang Yuan,
1
Wenhong Wei,
2
and Chao Qu
2
1
Engineering & Technology Institute, Dongguan University of Technology, Dongguan 523808, China
2
School of Computer, Dongguan University of Technology, Dongguan 523808, China
Correspondence should be addressed to Ming Tao; taoming@.com
Received October ; Accepted October
Academic Editor: Fatos Xhafa
Copyright © Ming Tao et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Addressing the energy eciency in data-centric and application-oriented wireless sensor networks is an eternal theme, and in
the practical scenarios deployed multiple ows, oen a serious problem of collisions among multiple paths caused by the erce
network resource competition directly inuences the whole network performance. To address this issue, in terms of the delay
sensitivity imposed on the deployed ows, a feature-aware cooperative relay selection scheme is developed by comprehensively
taking both the routing selection and contention avoidance into account, in which the concept of abstract domain is introduced to
extend the covered relay nodes. e optimal relays for the deployed multiow with specic probing and transmission requirements
are selected to nd collision-free and energy-ecient cooperative routings. Simulations conducted on NS- platform demonstrate
that the proposed cooperative routing outperforms the compared routing selection strategies in signicantly balancing the energy
distribution and prolonging the network lifetime.
1. Introduction
Wireless sensor network (WSN) as a data-centric and
application-oriented network has numerous delay-sensitive
probing tasks but also has numerous delay-tolerant probing
tasks. e prime purpose of such sensor network is gathering
the information of environments or the sensed objects and
sending the information back to end-users. In recent years,
there has been a rapid development in building and deploying
sensor networks which is promoted by the recent advances
in MEMS-based technologies and low-power short-range
radios. In addition, as the hardware for sensors has been
increasingly more aordable and widely available, sensor
networks have emerged as an ideal solution to a number of
important potential applications including civilian scenarios
in food and safety industries and environmental monitoring,
military scenarios for the digital battle eld and security
services.
In WSN, routing is an important factor aecting the
whole system performance, while designing routing proto-
cols for WSN is inuenced by many factors, such as hardware
restrictions, energy consumption, and network topology.
Many large-scale sensor networks consist of battery-powered
sensors and the battery unit may not be replaceable. ey
usually adopt the multihop communication mode to avoid
theSourcenodehavingahightransmittingpowerandthe
limited energy unit being depleted too soon. e restrained
storageandcomputingresourcealsomakethesensors
store mass of routing information and calculate complicated
routing impossible. Indeed, a major challenge facing the
development and deployment of large-scale sensor networks
is the scheduling of transmissions among nodes in the
manner of (1)automatically adapting to the changes in trac,
node state, and connectivity; and (2) prolonging the battery
lifespan of each node.
Concurrently, cooperative communication as ecient
physical layer technology has been widely researched, which
allows several nodes to cooperatively transmit gathered data
to a destination together and can oer signicant perfor-
mance enhancements, but also introduces some new poten-
tial problems. To address this issue, a feature-aware coopera-
tive relay selection scheme is developed by comprehensively
taking both the routing selection and contention avoidance
into account, in which, the concept of abstract domain is