Quality-of-information aware data delivery for wireless sensor networks: Description and experiments

Abstract

Sensor networks have become increasingly popular for a wide range of environmental monitoring and event detection applications. Sensors need to report data to the sinks without missing any important information or unusual events, though reporting large amount of data is infeasible for wireless sensor networks as they usually have limited network capability and energy. In this paper, we propose a quality-of-information aware and energy-efficient data delivery service to report data from sensors to the sinks. Our framework provides high quality of-information to the users with high data accuracy, short packet delay and low message overhead. Data packets are delivered selectively via different paths based on the information that they are carrying. Packets carrying significant information will be routed with higher priority, while packets with less importance might be dropped or delivered along some slower paths. We propose and implement a routing algorithm based on the SPEED protocol to reduce the number of messages without degrading the quality-of-information. Our work is evaluated by both simulations with real data and real experiments. The experimental results show that our approach can provide high data accuracy and low packet delay with the number of packets significantly reduced. ©2010 IEEE.