Information accuracy versus jointly sensing nodes in wireless sensor networks

A key issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to achieve a required information accuracy under some physical resource constraints especially in terms of energy consumption. Intuitively, more accurate information can be achieved by using more jointly sensing nodes at the expense of more energy consumption. However, both our analytical and simulation results show that information accuracy may also decrease as the number of jointly sensing nodes increases in the presence of noise, and the increment of information accuracy reaches zero when this number approaches infinity. In this paper, we discusse a model for information accuracy and the number and position of jointly sensing nodes in WSNs based on a quantitative definition of information accuracy by exploiting the spacial correlation between sensed data. The analytical results are validated by simulation.