Design of an annular ring Ferry-assisted topology for Wireless Sensor Networks

To ensure connectivity in highly sparse Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), we consider a Ferry-assisted Wireless Sensor Network (FWSN). In our FWSN, message ferries moving along concentric annulus collect the static sensors generated packets and propagate them throughout a ferry-to-ferry forwarding schema to the sink. Moreover, a ferry may embed a sensor and then could be assimilated to a mobile sensor node generating its own data. We provide a mathematical framework based on queuing theory to model the network and analyze its performances in terms of end-to-end throughput. Some of our findings are the characterization of the forwarding queues' stability and the average end-to-end throughput as well. At stability, we notice a special feature where the average end-to-end throughput becomes independent of the choice of the weighted fair queuing. © 2013 IEEE.