Variable Accuracy Sensing in Energy-Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Networks comprising large numbers of low-cost, low-power and miniature wireless sensors are used to capture accurate and reliable information of the physical phenomena they are proximate to. However being operated by batteries of finite capacity, energy efficiency is still the major concern in the design of protocols in such networks. In this paper, we first introduce a new sensing scheme that allows variable accuracy to be specified by end users to achieve a trade-off between accuracy and energy efficiency. We then consider the connected active node selection for network lifetime prolongation problem under the proposed scheme by modifying the route weights in a pre-existing algorithm and introduce a new algorithm. The objective of this work is to allow trade-off between accuracy and energy efficiency in a sensor network and use only a subset of sensors to realize a given query, so that energy at inactive ones can be conserved. Extensive experiments show that the proposed sensing scheme and algorithms attain a longer network lifetime by selecting a subset of sensors to provide data at an accuracy determined by end users.