A convex hull-based approximation of forest fire shape with distributed wireless sensor networks

Monitoring of physical phenomena is one of the most promising application fields of wireless sensor networks. In this work we focus on obtaining the shape of a forest fire. In this kind of applications, the information sensed by network nodes is usually transmitted to a base station located at the border of the network, where it is finally processed. However, such an approach requires that a large amount of data is transmitted through the network. In this paper, we assume that network nodes are able to collaborate in order to obtain an approximation of the forest fire shape without any base station, in a completely distributed way. We propose and analyze two techniques for performing this approximation. The first one makes intensive use of resources, while the second model incorporates an aggregation technique, reducing significantly resource requirements.