On Exploiting Sampling Jitter in Vehicular Sensor Networks

Vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) are composed of vehicular sensor nodes that collaboratively sample, communicate, and reconstruct the event signal at the sink node. Samples of event signals are subjected to jitter based on the propagation speed of signal and locations of vehicular sensors. In this paper, a theoretical analysis is presented to understand the effects and how to exploit the jitter in the sensed event signal for energy-efficient and reliable communication in VSNs. Results reveal that sampling jitter can be advantageous and can be exploited in developing adaptive communication techniques, which can provide significant energy conservation while maintaining reliability in VSNs.