Trade-off between coverage and data reporting latency for energy-conserving data gathering in wireless sensor networks

We propose a novel energy-conserving data gathering strategy for wireless sensor networks. The proposed strategy is based on a trade-off between coverage and data reporting latency with an ultimate goal of maximizing the network´s lifetime. The basic idea is to select in each round only a minimum of k sensors as data reporters which are sufficient for a desired sensing coverage given by the users or applications. Such a selection of the minimum data reporters also reduces the amount of traffic flow to the data gathering point in each round, and thus avoids network congestion as well as channel interference/contention. The proposed strategy includes three schemes for the minimum k-sensor selection. Using these schemes, we evaluate such fundamental issues as event detection integrity and data reporting latency, which can be critical in deploying the proposed data gathering strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that the average data reporting latency is hardly affected and the real-time event detection ratio is greater than 80% when the desired sensing coverage is at least 80%. It is also shown that the sensors can conserve a significant amount of energy with a small trade-off, and that the higher the network density, the higher is the energy conservation rate without any additional computation cost.