Green alarm systems driven by emergencies in industrial wireless sensor networks

An alarm system is a fundamental application of IWSNs. Most of the existing literature focuses on reliability and quality of service of alarm systems. In addition, timeliness is another big concern for alarm systems considering the serious consequences of various emergencies. However, with the explosion of energy consumption, energy efficiency is becoming more and more important for IWSNs. Improving energy efficiency effectively without reducing other performance of alarm systems is a severe challenge. In this article, we design a novel green framework of alarm systems for the industrial field based on the IWSN. The proposed framework is composed of two parts, the IWSN and the security sector, which are connected through wireless links. The main responsibility of the IWSN is to monitor and track emergency and deliver the collected data to the security sector; the main responsibility of the security sector is to store and analyze the received data stream, and send requests to the IWSN. In IWSN, sleeping schedules and routing algorithms are designed carefully to improve the energy efficiency, reliability, and timeliness of alarm systems. Tracking emergencies and reducing redundant nodes are also necessary. The security sector stores and analyzes a data stream, and then evaluates an emergency situation. At last, the estimated emergency situation is used to trigger some corresponding actions to tackle the emergency.