Energy efficient node engagement strategies for achieving data fidelity in wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks have gained importance in tracking of vital information. The accuracy of the sensor readings plays a major role in crucial applications like military and defense operations, and environment monitoring where the error margin has to be extremely small. In addition, sensor nodes are typically constrained in their computation, communication, and energy capacities and there is usually a need for managing sensor activities to utilize these limited resources in a judicious manner. Therefore, a participation criterion for the sensor nodes to balance fidelity of the collected data and conservation of nodes resources is important. This paper presents a novel node engagement strategy. The idea is to convoy a subset of the collected data reports while ensuring consensus of the nodes. Basically, nodes rotate transmission duties among neighbors. The data sent to the base-station will be based on the readings of the designated sensor. The neighboring nodes will act as passive listeners and stay quiet if the data does not deviate significantly from their measurements, which implies their endorsement of the accuracy of what the base-station will get. Otherwise, a subset of these nodes comes forward and transmits their readings so that the base-station can aggregate and accurately estimate the true value. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of energy conservation and responsiveness to drops in data fidelity.