Iso-Map: Energy-Efficient Contour Mapping in Wireless Sensor Networks

Contour mapping is a crucial part of many wireless sensor network applications. Many efforts have been made to avoid collecting data from all the sensors in the network and producing maps at the sink, which is proven to be inefficient. The existing approaches (often aggregation based), however, suffer from heavy transmission traffic and incur large computational overheads on each sensor node. We propose Iso-Map, an energy-efficient protocol for contour mapping, which builds contour maps based solely on the reports collected from intelligently selected "isoline nodes" in wireless sensor networks. Iso-Map achieves high-quality contour mapping while significantly reducing the generated traffic from O(n) to O(radicn), where n is the total number of sensor nodes in the field. The per-node computation overhead is also restrained as a constant. We conduct comprehensive trace-driven simulations to verify this protocol, and demonstrate that Iso-Map outperforms the previous approaches in the sense that it produces contour maps of high fidelity with significantly reduced energy cost.