Spatiotemporal sampling rates for wireless sensor networks

This paper addresses an important issue in the design of sensor networks: determining the spatiotemporal sampling rate of the network under the condition of minimum energy usage. In this paper, we propose a new collision-free protocol for gathering sensor data. We use this protocol to find the tradeoff between the spatial sampling rates, temporal sampling rates and the energy consumed in the network. We also compare the delay incurred and the energy consumed in collecting data at a given spatial sampling rate when the proposed transmission scheduling scheme is used versus the delay incurred and energy spent when IEEE 802.11 is the underlying media access scheme.