Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process-Based Balanced Topology Control of Wireless Sensor Networks for Machine Vibration Monitoring

Detection of vibration by wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an effective approach for monitoring mechanical equipment. Particularly for large-scale mechanical equipment, multi-hop topology is necessary. However, link blocking by an unbalanced topology can significantly reduce the communication quality and the network lifetime. Motivated by the aforementioned problems, a balanced network topology control method based on the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is proposed. Four criteria, including residual energy, node degree, node depth, and transmission power, are considered to construct the network topology. A fuzzy judgment matrix is constructed to calculate the weight vector composed of the weight of each criterion. For each node, the optimal associating decision factors are calculated using the weight vector to construct the network topology. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can ensure robust link quality, improve data throughput effectively, and reduce power consumption by at least 400 mJ during each monitoring cycle, which can extend the network lifetime effectively.