Title: QS-Sift: QoS and spatial correlation-based medium access control in wireless sensor networks

Authors: Ming Zhao, Zhigang Chen, Zhihui Ge

Addresses: School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Hunan Province, PR China. ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Hunan Province, PR China. ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Hunan Province, PR China

Abstract: Recently, it has been argued that allowing only a part of sensor nodes to transmit their data can reduce energy consumption dramatically. In this paper, we investigate the methods of selecting sensor nodes in-depth. Numerical results show that the transmission of poor sensed data (e.g. low SNR) is unnecessary because the contribution of poor data to the given maximum distortion Quality of Service (QoS) is very small if not negative. Based on this observation, we introduce the QS-Sift protocol, which ensure that nodes with good sensed data (e.g. high SNR) get higher priority than those with poor data when contending for the shared channel. And poor data has less chance to be delivered. All these processing are performed on each node without any centralised mechanism. Extensive simulations have been done to verify the effectiveness of the proposed schema in terms of energy consumption and transmission delay under given QoS constraints.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; wireless networks; medium access control; MAC; distortion; energy efficiency; spatial correlation; signal to noise ratio; quality of service; QoS; energy consumption; node selection; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2007.013203

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2007 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.228 - 234

Published online: 11 Apr 2007 *

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