A Design and Implementation of Wireless Sensor

Network Routing on Nano-Qplus Platform

Heeseok Choi, Ilgon Park, Youngsam Shin, Seungmin Park
Ubiquitous Computing Middleware Research Team, ETRI
{choihs, gon, esophia, minpark}@etri.re.kr
Abstract - Recent advancement in wireless technologies has
enabled the development of low-cost sensor networks. The
wireless sensor networks can be used for various application

multipath routing system for wide applications of wireless

sensor networks.

areas such as home, health, and robot. Sensor nodes are scattered

2. Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

densely in a field either close to or inside the phenomenon.

Therefore, special multihop wireless routing protocols between

the sensor nodes and the sink node are needed. Furthermore,
wireless sensor network routing protocols are influenced by
many challenging factors in terms of energy, processing, and
storage capacities. We developed a wireless sensor network
routing system based on Nano-Qplus Platform. The Nano-Qplus
platform is composed of nano HAL, sensing and actuating, task
management, power management, and message handling module.
In addition, the Nano-Qplus platform includes ATmegal28 MCU
and cc2420 IEEE802.15.4 RF communication module. In
consideration of the functional and hardware limitation of the

Nano-Qplus platform, we developed energy efficient routing

system based on the Nano-Qplus platform.

Wireless Sensor Network, Sensor Network

Keywords
Routing, Nano-Qplus

1. Introduction
Recent advancement in wireless communications and
electronics has enabled the development of low-cost,
low-power, multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size
and communicate with each other in short distances. These
tiny sensor nodes, which consist of sensing, data processing,
and communicating components, leverage the idea of wireless
sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks represent a
significant improvement over traditional sensors[1]. Such
wireless sensor networks are applicable to the areas of home,
health, and robot. In health, for example, sensor nodes can be
deployed to monitor patients and assist disabled patients.
Sensor nodes are scattered densely in a field either close to or
inside the phenomenon. Therefore, special multihop wireless
routing protocols between the sensor nodes and the sink node
are needed. Furthermore, wireless sensor network routing
protocols are influenced by many challenging factors in terms
of energy, processing, and storage capacities.
We developed sensor network routing system based on
Nano-Qplus platform[2]. The Nano-Qplus platform is
composed of nano HAL for abstracting the hardware part,
sensing and actuating, task management, power management,
and message handling module. In addition, the Nano-Qplus
platform includes ATmegal28 MCU[3] and cc2420 [4]
IEEE8O2. 15.4[5] RF communication module. Based on the
Nano-Qplus platform, we developed energy efficient

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Although many protocols and algorithms have been proposed

for traditional wireless ad-hoc networks, they are not well
suited to the unique features and application requirements of
sensor networks. To illustrate this point, the differences
between sensor networks and ad-hoc networks are:
* The number of sensor nodes i a sensor network can be
several orders of magnitude higher than the nodes in an ad-hoc
network.
* Sensor nodes are densely deployed.
* Sensor nodes are prone to failures.
* The topology of a sensor network changes very frequently.
. Sensor nodes mainly use a broadcast communication
paradigm, whereas most an-hoc networks are based on
point-to-point communications.
* Sensor nodes are limited in power, computational capacities,
and memory.
. Sensor nodes may not have global identification (ID)
because of the large amount of overhead and large number of
sensors.
As illustrated above, the communication between two sensor
nodes in WSN are generally restricted due to battery size,
memory size by node size, processing capability,
communication distance between sensor nodes. Therefore, the
communication between sensor nodes requires considering of
maximizing energy efficiency, improving the reliability of
packet transmission, maintaining minimized routing
information, reducing the complexity of algorithms besides
basic functions of routing[6,7,8].

. Routing considering energy efficiency - this can be

understood from two views. One is reducing energy
consumption itself through transmitting data according to a
shortest path. The other is evenly distributing energy
consumption. According to the application characteristics, the
different approach is required.
. Routing considering reliable data transmission - the accurate
and resilient data transmission is considered more importantly
rather than energy efficiency. Multipath routing is often used
to enhance the reliability of WSNs.

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In summary, routing protocols are often studied that use

multiple paths rather than a single path in order to enhance
network performance. The reasons for classical multipath
routing are:

Load balancing - traffic between a source-destination pair

can be distributed across multiple (partially or completely)

disjoint paths
* * Reliable data delivery - the possibility of reliable delivery
can be increased through transmitting data across multiple
paths

The SSN is composed of four blocks: Main, Base, Sensor, and

Actuator. The Main block has ATmegal28 microcontroller
and CC2420 IEEE802.15.4 compliant RF transceiver. The
Base block is used for Anchor node with RS-232 serial I/F,
parallel I/O and external power source. For sensing ofphysical
environment, the Sensor block has several sensor entities, such
as light, humidity, temperature, and ultra sound. The Actuator
block is made up several electrical switches (relays) and can
be combined with electric appliances in order to turn Off/On
power. In case of normal application, the sensor node is
power-supplied by two AA 3.3 batteries.

3. Nano-Qplus Platform

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The Nano-Qplus platform[6] consists of a operating system

for WSN and sensor hardware. Sensor nodes including
ATmegal28 MCU require a operating system for sensing,
processing, and wireless communication. The sensor node is
made up of four basic components such as a sensing unit,a
processing unit, a transceiver unit, and a power unit.
Subsequently, the Nano-Qplus platform is described in more
detail.

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3.1 Software: the Nano-Qplus Operating System

Figure 2. Sensor Node Hardware Architecture

As shown in Figure 1, the architecture of the Nano-Qplus

4. Design of Routing Protocol

resembles a classical modular and layered design and consists

of dynamically-loaded modules included in hardware,

Nano-OS, and application parts respectively. The hardware
part is composed of MCU using ATmegal28, RF module, that
for wireless communication, and
is CC2420
Sensors/Actuators. The Nano-OS part has a role as kernel
scheduler and network protocol stack for handling RF
messages, and it have a device driver modules, called as nHAL,
for abstracting the hardware part. Furthermore, the Nano-OS
part also offers the system APIs for convenient developments
of WSN applications to sensor networking programmers. In
the end, the application part consists of one or more modules
interacting via system APIs with Nano-OS part.

We designed a routing protocol with focusing on energy

efficiency for extending network lifetime, robust network
topology, and reliable data transmission. As a result, we
designed an Energy-Aware Multipath Routing protocol
(EAMR). The characteristics of the designed routing protocol
are as followings:

4.1 Energy Efficiency for Extending Network Lifetime

EAMR considers current energy levels of sensor nodes when

it establishes routing paths from sources to destinations. A
source node broadcasts a route request message (RREQ) in
order to find a routing path for a destination node. Then next
Se/lAur
Rute
MAP
Router
ApptApliction nodes having received the RREQ message continuously
forward it after checking their own energy value. When next
System APIs
nodes forward the RREQ message, they forward it after
waiting for forwarding delay time according to their energy
level.
Nano-OS
Therefore, nodes having more energy forward RREQ
packet more quickly than nodes having less energy. Due to
this approach, nodes having high energy value can be selected
in terms of energy efficiency during establishing a routing path
Hardware
from source node to destination node. Therefore, EAMR can
extend wireless sensor network's lifetime by acquiring two
energy efficient routing paths.
Figure 1. Nano-Qplus OS Software Architecture
In addition, if first path's energy level falls below threshold
value, first path is replaced with second path. This results in
extending lifetime through equalizing nodes' energy usage.
3.2 Hardware: Smart Sensor Node

The sensor hardware which is called Smart Sensor Node

(SSN) focuses on low-cost, low-power, and high-modularity.

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4.2 Robust Network Topology

EAMR supports a multipath routing by establishing two
disjoint routing paths. In addition, EAMR guarantees the
disjointness between first route and second route for satisfying
robust network topology. If a node receives the same RREQ
message packet when it establishes routes, it discards the same
RREQ message packet without forwarding it to next nodes.
Due to nodes' fault or energy exhaustion, sensor network
topology is changeable. Since it replace missing path with
backup path in case ofmissing path, the robustness ofnetwork
topology are satisfied by quickly reconstructing network
topology. In addition, EAMR enables the distribution of
energy consumption over overall nodes.
4.3 Reliable Data Transmission
In order to achieve reliable data transmission, EAMR uses
the mechanism sending ACK in response of transmitted
sensing data. A sensor node waiting for ACK after
transmitting the data sets ACK timeout after transmitting
sensing data, and wait for the ACK. If the sensor node receives
the ACK within the ACK timeout, it transmits new sensing
data. If the sensor node doesn't receive the ACK within the
ACK timeout, it considers it as transmission error. In this case,
it retransmits the data.
In addition, if data transmission to next hop fails due to
node's fault or energy exhaustion, the node sends an error
message packet to source node. Then source node receiving
the error message resends it with using second path. Therefore,
the reliability of data transmission is guaranteed.

5. Development of WSN Routing System based on

the Nano-Qplus Platform
We developed our sensor network routing protocol on the
Nano-Qplus platform. The developed routing system supports
energy-aware multipath routing for energy efficiency and
resilient data transmission. Figure 3 represents the structure of
our routing system.

* Sender - this module performs the function transferring

sensing data to sink node. The Sender provides APIs for data
transmission to application layer.
* Receiver - this is a module implementing APIs provided to
application layer, which is performed on sink node. If the data
from source node are received, the Receiver puts them into
interface buffer and it sends ACK to source node.
* Receiver Event Handler - If events occur at the NIAC layer,
Receiver Event Handler stores it on task queue for Receiver
Event Handler to process the events according to the
message's type.
* Queue Manager - the data structure of task queue is circular
queue, and all events are processed via task queue. If there are
events to be processed, they are pushed into task queue. Then,
a processing module processes them. The Queue Manager
performs works such as pushing data into queue and popping
data from queue.
* Routing Manager - this module processes messages of task
queue using routing table and EAMR checker. This is
composed of routing table manager, message processor,
forwarding module, relaying module, and broadcast handler
broadcasting messages to nodes.
* EAMR Checker - Compared with AODV, EAMR depends
on delay time by each node's energy value. To do this, EAMR
is composed of an Energy Estimator and a Delay Estimator.
The Energy Estimator evaluates node's energy level, and the
Delay Estimator determines delay value by inherent laziness
representing overall sensor network energy status. Due to this
approach, nodes having high energy value can be selected in
terms of energy efficiency during establishing a routing path
from source node to destination node.

6. Conclusion
We developed our sensor network routing system on the
Nano-Qplus platform. Our routing system supports
energy-aware multipath routing for energy efficiency and
resilient data transmission. In future, we will improve our
routing system based on the Nano-Qplus platform, evaluate
the performance of the system.
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