Data Reduction Mechanism Using Coverage Based Association Method in Wireless Sensor Networks

The advance in wireless technologies and microelectronic devices has led to the development of sensor nodes that are capable of sensing, processing, and transmitting data. This new trend in sensor technology led the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A WSN consists of several sensor nodes that are designed to “sense” the environment around them and send, in cooperation with each other, detected events to a well-equipped node referred to as the “sink.” The detected events are transmitted to the sink in the following three ways: 1) periodically 2) upon satisfying a particular predicate (event based) 3) as an answer to a query (query based). Due to distributed nature and the limited resources of sensor nodes (e.g. energy, communication, and computation) and unreliability of wireless communication increase the possibility of errors, lost messages, delays in data delivery, and losses of functionality. These factors are potentially devastating to the performance and the overall quality of service of WSNs.

In order to improve the performance and quality of service of WSNs, sensor association method has been proposed. Sensor Association method (SA) discovers the correlation between all sensor nodes in the WSNs, regardless of their locations. In SA method, coverage is main drawback. To address this issue, coverage based association method has been proposed. The main goal of the coverage based association method is to improve the coverage as well as the performance and quality of service of WSNs. In this work, the performance metrics in terms of amount of redundant data, energy consumption and packet delivery ratio for coverage based association method and sensor association method have been analyzed and compared.