A Comparative Effectiveness Evaluation of Map Construction Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Multiple applications in wireless sensor networks (WSN) require node-level accuracy. One popular example of these applications is the map-based visualization of live spatial sensor data. The specific WSN properties such as energy imply that the data collection and/or the in-network map construction should carefully address the tradeoff between energy/network overhead and map accuracy. Accordingly, several map construction approaches have been proposed. The energy efficiency of reducing the network traffic overhead has been proved in the corresponding papers for a set of carefully selected parameters. To date, there exists no quantitative comparative study that considers a wide range of physical phenomena and network properties to provide a comprehensive evaluation of these map construction approaches. In this paper, we present a series of protocol efficiency evaluation criteria that are then used to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of the existing map construction approaches by analyzing their design and simulating their performance in a wide range of environment scenarios and network settings. Using extensive simulations, we identify which map construction approach outperforms the other for most common application scenarios. Our main achievements are detailed insights of the existing approaches and proposals for improving existing approaches.