Data-quality Guided Load Shedding for Expensive In-Network Data Processing

In situ wireless sensor networks, not only have to route sensed data from sources to destinations, but also have to filter and fuse observations to eliminate potentially irrelevant data. If data arrive faster to such fusion nodes than the speed with which they can consume the inputs, this will result in an overflow of input buffers. In this paper, we develop load shedding mechanisms which take into consideration both data quality and expensive nature of fusion operators. In particular, we present quality assessment models for objects and fusion operators and we highlight that such quality assessments may impose partial orders on objects.