Towards efficient data collection in WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are nowadays used in many diverse applications such as road traffic monitoring, emergency medical care, battlefield surveillance and agriculture etc. In such applications, it is fundamental to gather the data accumulated by each sensor and forward it to the sink for processing. Transmitting this data from the sensor field to the sink is reliant on efficient data collection mechanisms. Various collection processes address the following fundamental questions: how fast can we transmit the data carrying emergency events? What data actually needs to be transmitted? How do we ensure the accuracy of the transmitted data? In my PhD, I investigate these questions by exploring and evaluating different techniques for efficient data collection in terms of time delay, energy consumption, and accuracy of the reported data. This paper presents an overview of our proposed solutions to reduce emergency messages transmission delay in WSNs based Road Traffic Monitoring, as well as our current and future works.