Sampling and transport co-design in Wireless Sensor Networks

A key task in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is to deliver specific information about a spatial phenomenon of interest. To this end, a few Sensor Nodes (SNs) sample the phenomenon and transmit the acquired samples, typically multihop, to the application through a gateway called sink. Many applications require the spatial sampling to be accurate and the delivery to be reliable. However, providing a higher accuracy/reliability comes at the cost of higher energy overhead as additional messages are required: increasing the number of samples to increase the accuracy of sampling and increasing the number of retransmissions to increase the transport reliability. Existing design approaches overlook optimized spatial sampling accuracy and transport reliability in combination for minimizing energy consumption. In this paper, we sketch a new approach in providing the optimized solution for sampling accuracy and transport reliability in composition for a maximized efficiency.