Wireless Sensor Network Design for Energy-Efficient Monitoring

Abstract

Wireless sensors are small-scale mobile devices that can programmatically measure physical quantities, perform simple computations, store, receive, and transmit data. The lattice built by a set of cooperating sensors is called a sensor network. Since sensor networks provide a powerful infrastructure for large-scale monitoring applications, an important issue is the network design to achieve an optimal placement of the sensors to allow (1) energy-efficient monitoring and (2) gathering meaningful data. This chapter presents a novel approach to optimize sensing node placement (e.g., for new to-be-deployed networks) and efficiently acquire data from existing sensor networks. A historical data analysis task is performed to discover spatial and temporal correlations and identify sets of correlated sensors. Then, an algorithm based on a cost function considering both distance and communication cost selects the candidate sensors, leading to the optimized network design and acquisition. Candidate sensors can then be deployed and/or queried instead of the whole network, thus reducing the network cost and extending its lifetime in terms of energy consumption. Experiments, performed on a real wireless sensor network, demonstrate the adaptability and the effectiveness of the proposed approach in optimizing the sensor network design and the data acquisition.