Stateless and efficient boundary simplification of phenomena in sensor networks

Object tracking has been a prominent application domain of sensor networks. For many applications, it is sufficient to monitor the boundary of a physical phenomenon instead of the full extent of the phenomenon in return for significant energy savings. However, continuous monitoring of a large phenomena with irregular boundaries will still incur a significant energy expenditure in a sensor network. We propose a novel distributed algorithm, SpatialZip, to efficiently simplify the boundary resulting in less energy expenditure.