Exploring Non Uniform Quality of Service for Extending WSN Lifetime

Interest in extracting and exploiting information from wireless sensor networks has been increasing for several years. Most scenarios focus on collecting and evaluating large amounts of data at a single sink, and many protocols and algorithms have been designed to accomplish this efficiently. However, not all applications require all data, nor do they have a single collection point Instead, multiple moving base stations collect and exploit information, concentrating on data gathered in their immediate vicinity and requiring less precise knowledge about the data collected far away. While such a scenario can be supported by traditional approaches that present perfect information, they actually require less data, therefore providing a clear opportunity for increasing network lifetime without sacrificing the data quality requirements of the application. This idea of non uniform quality of service is the focus of this paper, along with two preliminary protocols demonstrating its potential and motivating future work