Quality-based event reliability protocol in wireless sensor networks

For reliable event detection in wireless sensor networks, a sink requires collective information reported by sensor nodes sensing an event. In other words, the sink has to receive a certain amount of data dealing with the event for reliable event detection. Existing studies propose quantity-based event reliability protocols that improve event reliability by increasing the number of data successfully transmitted by controlling transport process. These studies present diverse schemes to successfully transmit as many reporting data as possible such as diversification of routing path for congestion avoidance and control of data reporting frequency rate for transport error compensation. However, since it frequently happens that wireless sensor networks with restricted capacity cannot deliver more than required amount of data due to data collision and congestion, the quantity-based event reliability protocols have limitation to raise the possibility of event detection. In this paper, we proposes a Quality-based Event Reliability Protocol (QERP) utilizing a property that the reporting data from sensor nodes are different in the contribution degree (CD) for event detection according to their environmental conditions. QERP selects sensor nodes to send their reporting data according to CD, and differentially transports them by CD-based buffer management and load balancing. Simulation results show that QERP detect more reliably and energy-efficiently an event than quantity-based event reliability protocols.