An Analytical Study of Low Energy Monitoring Networks for Large-Scale Data Centers

Environmental monitoring using wireless sensors plays a key role in detecting hotspots or over-cooling conditions in data centers (DCs). However, monitoring a large enterprise or cloud DCs requires the deployment of thousands of sensors distributively with an operational time over months or years. Low Energy Monitoring Network (LEMoNet) is a two-tier Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based protocol for DC monitoring that leverages multi-gateway packet reception in its top tier to mitigate the unreliable BLE communication in the low tier. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to study the scalability and energy efficiency of LeMoNet in large-scale DCs. The accuracy of the model is validated through extensive event-driven simulations. Evaluation results show that LEMoNet can achieve high reliability in a network of 4800 nodes at a duty cycle of 15 sec (or equivalently, at an aggregated traffic load of 66Kbps per advertisement channel).