Decentralized Detection of Topological Events in Evolving Spatial Regions
Qualitative information about topological events, like the merging or splitting of spatial regions, has many important applications in environmental monitoring. Examples of such applications include detecting the emergence of 'hot spots' in sea temperature around a coral reef; or the break up and dispersion of an environmental pollution spill. This paper develops and tests an efficient, decentralized spatial algorithm capable of detecting high-level topological events occurring to spatial regions monitored by a wireless sensor network. The algorithm, called In-Network Qualitative Identification of Region Evolution (INQUIRE), is decentralized because at no point does any single system element possess global knowledge of the entire system state. Instead, INQUIRE relies purely on a sensor node's local knowledge of its own state and the state of its immediate network neighbors. Experimental evaluation of the INQUIRE algorithm demonstrates that our decentralized approach can substantially improve scalability of communication when compared with efficient centralized alternatives.
environmental monitoring wireless sensor network areal object decentralized spatial computing topological change