Trade-off between energy efficiency and report validity for mobile sensor networks

Abstract

Mobile sensor networks (MSNs) have been widely deployed to provide a ubiquitous solution to real-time monitoring applications such as traffic data collection in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), ocean data collection in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), and biodata collection in wireless body area networks (WBANs). One major issue for designing MSNs is the energy-validity trade-off, that is, the trade-off between the energy efficiency for mobile sensors (MSs) and the validity of sensing reports. In this article, we propose a novel mechanism, Energy-Efficient Distributedly Controlled Reporting (E2DCR), to mitigate the energy consumption for MSs in real-time monitoring applications while keeping the sensing report valid. In this mechanism, we design dynamic sleeping adjustment (DSA) algorithms to adjust an MS's sleeping period using a heuristic method to reduce energy consumption. We provide analytical models to evaluate the performance of E2DCR in terms of the power savings and report validity. It has been shown that with E2DCR, MSs can report with less energy consumption while satisfying delay constraints for real-time monitoring applications.