Information Quality aware sensor network services

Sensor networks with a number of wirelessly inter-connected devices have proven useful for many applications in diverse domains. The challenges of scale and resource constraints posed by this system have led to development of novel network protocols and services, but their focus has been on traditional metrics of quality of service of network data transport. Arguing that a holistic view of these systems requires an end-to-end view that combines networking quality of service concerns with the data quality and integrity of sensor sources and performance of sensor fusion algorithms, we propose to use the ldquoquality of informationrdquo (QoI) as a performance metric associated with the end result produced by a sensor network. In this paper we describe the factors that affect QoI, and describe how network protocols and services can be designed to be QoI aware.