Robust Monitor Assignment with Minimum Cost for Sensor Network Tomography

In wired networks, monitor-based network tomography has been proved to be an effective technology for network internal state measurements. Existing wired network tomography approaches assume that the network topology is relatively static. However, the network topology of sensor networks is usually changing over time due to wireless dynamics. In this paper, we study the problem to assign a number of sensor nodes as monitors in large scale sensor networks, so that the end-to-end measurements among monitors can be used to identify hop-by-hop link metrics. We propose RoMA, a Robust Monitor Assignment, algorithm to assign monitors in large scale sensor networks with dynamically changing topology. RoMA includes two components, confidence-based robust topology generation and cost-minimized monitor assignment. We implement RoMA and evaluate its performance based on a deployed large scale sensor network. Results show that RoMA achieves high identifiability with dynamically changing topology and is able to assign monitors with minimum cost.