An energy-efficient adaptive sampling scheme for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are new monitoring platforms. To cope with their resource constraints, in terms of energy and bandwidth, spatial and temporal correlation in sensor data can be exploited to find an optimal sampling strategy to reduce number of sampling nodes and/or sampling frequencies while maintaining high data quality. Majority of existing adaptive sampling approaches change their sampling frequency upon detection of (significant) changes in measurements. There are, however, applications that can tolerate (significant) changes in measurements as long as measurements fall within a specific range. Using existing adaptive sampling approaches for these applications is not energy-efficient. Targeting this type of applications, in this paper, we propose an energy-efficient adaptive sampling technique ensuring a certain level of data quality. We compare our proposed technique with two existing adaptive sampling approaches in a simulation environment and show its superiority in terms of energy efficiency and data quality.