Collaborative data gathering in wireless sensor networks using measurement co-occurrence
Wireless ad hoc networks of battery-powered microsensors (WSNs) are proliferating rapidly and transforming how information is gathered and processed, and how we affect our environment. The limited energy of those sensors poses the challenge of using such systems in all energy efficient manner to perform various activities. A common activity of many applications of WSNs is that of data gathering: for each time step, gather the measurement from each sensor to a base station. Often there is redundancy and/or dependency among the sensor measurements. How to identify the data redundancy/dependency and utilize them oil improving energy efficiency of data gathering has been one of the attractive topics. We propose using measurement co-occurrence to identify data redundancy and a novel collaborative data gathering approach utilizing co-occurrence that offers a trade-off between the communication cost of data gathering versus errors at estimating the sensor measurements at the base station. A key tenant of our approach is to have sensors with co-occurring measurements alternate in transmitting such co-occurring measurements to the base station, and having the base station make inferences about the sensor measurements utilizing only the data transmitted to it. We present two effective in-network methods for detecting co-occurrence of measurements, as well as a simple and efficient protocol for scheduling the transmission of the sensor measurements to the base station. We provide experimental results on synthetic and real datasets showing that the proposed system offers substantial (up to 65%) reduction of the communication costs of data gathering with a small number of measurement inference errors (<6%) at the base station. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
data gathering wireless sensor networks co-occurrence set resemblance