Data-Centric Density Control for Wireless Sensor Networks

The unplanned and random deployment of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may impose a high node density on a specific region. This concentration can be exploited by density control mechanisms to increase network lifetime, by deactivating temporarily redundant sensor nodes. Previous approaches for density control in WSN focus in guaranteeing full sensing coverage of monitoring area. This work presents a new data-centric approach where density control is performed to increase network lifetime preserving precision of sampled data. Using statistical techniques, density is determined according to sampling. The results show that this approach achieved an improvement of 3 times of network lifetime, while it guarantees a data precision defined by a user.