Energy-aware compress and forward systems for wireless monitoring of time-varying fields

Dense monitoring of time-varying 2D field by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) needs to define new strategies to aggregate and encode data according to 2D sensor deployments. In this paper optimal design of communication protocol for WSN is conveniently cast for a set of linear sensor networks (sensor arrays) synchronously monitoring a correlated 2D time-varying field (e.g., for tracking time variations). Sensors aggregate data hop-by-hop by compressing the new samples gathered from the sensor board and forwarding towards the next sensor in the route. Compression is based on a linear predictive encoding to exploit the correlation properties of the field. Cross-layer design of source, channel coding and medium access control are jointly analyzed for optimal resource allocation and interference management to minimize energy consumption. Seismic monitoring application is analyzed to corroborate the design approach.