A Statistical Approach to Contour Line Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks With Practical Considerations

Contour line estimation in a monitored physical phenomenon using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with cross-layer considerations is investigated in this paper. Herein, we present a statistical approach to locate contour points for contour line construction in the presence of irregular sensor deployment with the assistant of Delaunay triangular meshes. The proposed contour-estimation algorithm has certain error-correction capability, and it is robust to the data degradation coming from sensing and/or communication noise. To ensure the success of the proposed algorithm, we further analyze three sources of signal distortion: sensing noise, data quantization error, and data communication noise. We find that choosing a proper data quantization level can balance the communication cost and the desired signal quality. Meanwhile, the impact of channel impairment can be mitigated by the appropriate data-fusion mechanism. In this paper, an adaptive data-fusion mechanism is proposed to avoid excessive packet retransmissions. The correctness of the proposed approach is verified through simulation, and the effects of different system parameters on the overall system performance are also given to show the robustness of the proposed algorithm. This paper also offers some guidelines on the design of the WSN system.