Rate-constrained uniform data collection in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a sensor node may not always be able to report all its readings to the sink node because of limited network resources. Thus, it is desirable to have an efficient data reporting strategy with high accuracy for data reporting in such networks. In this study, the authors study data reporting in a WSN with no a priori information on future sensor readings and analyse the rationale behind the widely used equi-interval data reporting strategy in terms of the accuracy in data collection. To support the equi-interval data reporting strategy, the authors propose an adaptive rate control algorithm to achieve the maximum data reporting rate under the bandwidth constraint, and further extend this algorithm to one that can adaptively adjust the reporting rate of a sensor based on the residual energy of the sensor in order to prolong the network lifetime. Simulation results show that the equi-interval data reporting strategy can achieve higher accuracy than other strategies and with the proposed rate control algorithms it can further improve the network performance in terms of data accuracy and network lifetime.