Information-aware traffic reduction for wireless sensor networks

Environmental monitoring is one of the most popular applications in wireless sensor networks. Although it is important to obtain a continuous record of the environment, users may gain enough information without receiving every routine sensor measurement. Reducing unnecessary traffic allows better utilization of the network resources. However, it is uneasy to decide on when and what kind of traffic to reduce in a dynamically changing environment. In this paper, we study the problem of information-aware traffic reduction for wireless sensor networks. We propose a two-step information-aware traffic reduction algorithm to address this problem. First, we provide a distributed and real-time algorithm for sensors to classify their measurements and report them selectively based on the importance of information. Then, we propose a bandwidth allocation algorithm to assign different forwarding probabilities to packets considering both the information quality and the network load. Our algorithm can be implemented and integrated easily with existing routing protocols to maximize the quality of information to the users, while reducing the amount of network traffic. We evaluate our approach based on the real sensing measurements to demonstrate the quality of information achieved. Simulations are also conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme in a larger network.