Relay Selection with Partial Information in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Our work is motivated by geographical forwarding of sporadic alarm packets to a base station in a wireless sensor network (WSN), where the nodes are sleep-wake cycling periodically and asynchronously. When a node (referred to as the source) gets a packet to forward, either by detecting an event or from an upstream node, it has to wait for its neighbors in a forwarding set (referred to as relays) to wake-up. Each of the relays is associated with a random reward (e.g., the progress made towards the sink) that is iid. To begin with, the source is uncertain about the number of relays, their wake-up times and the reward values, but knows their distributions. At each relay wake-up instant, when a relay reveals its reward value, the source's problem is to forward the packet or to wait for further relays to wake-up. In this setting, we seek to minimize the expected waiting time at the source subject to a lower bound on the average reward. In terms of the operations research literature, our work can be considered as a variant of the asset selling problem. We formulate the relay selection problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), where the unknown state is the number of relays. We begin by considering the case where the source knows the number of relays. For the general case, where the source only knows a pmf on the number of relays, it has to maintain a posterior pmf on the number of relays and forward the packet iff the pmf is in an optimum stopping set. We show that the optimum stopping set is convex and obtain inner and outer bounds to this set. The computational complexity of the above policies motivates us to formulate an alternative simplified model, the optimal policy for which is a simple threshold rule. We provide simulation results to compare the performance of the various one-hop and end-to-end forwarding policies.