Energy-efficient data collection in heterogeneous wireless sensor and actor networks

In this paper, we address the issue of activity scheduling of sensors in heterogeneous wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs), thereby proposing an energy-efficient data collection scheme in such networks. In order to extend the lifetime of heterogeneous WSANs, sensors are activated and deactivated under certain constraints throughout the network operations. Here, we propose a coordination framework in which actors exchange information with each other and decide about the availability of redundant sensors that are eventually deactivated to save energy. In particular, let there be r different types of sensors with each sensor observing a particular sensing parameter. Under the initial deployment of sensors and actors within some field of observation, if an actor v receives information regarding k different sensing parameters, either directly from sensors or through other actors, then our scheme determines a small subset of sensors that are sufficient to provide information regarding the same k sensing parameters to v.