Energy Efficient Node Engagement Strategies for Achieving Data Fidelity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have gained importance in tracking of vital information. The accuracy of the sensor readings plays a major role in crucial applications like military and defense operations, environment monitoring where the error margin has to be extremely small. In addition, the employed sensor nodes are typically constrained in their computation, communication and energy capacities and there is usually a need for managing the sensor activities to utilize the limited resources in a judicious manner. Therefore, a participation criterion of the sensor nodes to balance the fidelity of the collected data and the interest on conserving the nodes' resources is important. This thesis presents a novel node engagement strategy. The idea is to convoy a subset of the collected data reports while ensuring the consensus of the nodes. Basically, nodes rotate the transmission duties among the neighbors in the vicinity. The data sent to the base-station will be based on the readings of the designated sensor. The neighboring nodes will act as passive listeners and stay quiet if the data is not deviating more than a threshold from their measurements which implies their endorsement of the accuracy of what the base-station will get. Otherwise, a subset of these nodes will come forward and transmit their readings so that the base-station will can aggregate and make the right conclusion. The proposed approach is validated through simulation. The validation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of network lifetime and responsiveness to any drops in data fidelity

Energy Efficient Node Engagement Strategies for Achieving Data Fidelity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have gained importance in tracking of vital information. The accuracy of the sensor readings plays a major role in crucial applications like military and defense operations, environment monitoring where the error margin has to be extremely small. In addition, the employed sensor nodes are typically constrained in their computation, communication and energy capacities and there is usually a need for managing the sensor activities to utilize the limited resources in a judicious manner. Therefore, a participation criterion of the sensor nodes to balance the fidelity of the collected data and the interest on conserving the nodes' resources is important. This thesis presents a novel node engagement strategy. The idea is to convoy a subset of the collected data reports while ensuring the consensus of the nodes. Basically, nodes rotate the transmission duties among the neighbors in the vicinity. The data sent to the base-station will be based on the readings of the designated sensor. The neighboring nodes will act as passive listeners and stay quiet if the data is not deviating more than a threshold from their measurements which implies their endorsement of the accuracy of what the base-station will get. Otherwise, a subset of these nodes will come forward and transmit their readings so that the base-station will can aggregate and make the right conclusion. The proposed approach is validated through simulation. The validation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of network lifetime and responsiveness to any drops in data fidelity