Information theoretic self-management of Wireless Sensor Networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is deployed primarily with the interest of collecting information about an area of interest or some events of interest occurring in that area. A WSN transmits the sensed information to the end users in the form of data-packets. The number of packets is directly proportional to the transmission rate of the nodes in the WSN. In this paper, a distributed self-management scheme for WSNs, named as Information Theoretic Self-Management (InTSeM), for WSNs, is proposed. The scheme helps the nodes in the network to adapt themselves with the changes in their environment and to select an appropriate transmission rate using an information theoretic metric called Symmetric Kullback-Leibler Distance. This dynamic selection of transmission rate conserves the energy of nodes while maintaining the quality of data. Extensive simulation results show that InTSeM performs better than other schemes with fixed transmission rate.