On Data Fusion and Lifetime Constraints in Wireless Sensor Networks

The problems of energy efficient sensor network configuration and local fusion of sensed data have been addressed separately in the previous works. In this paper, we propose to analyze the sensing accuracy with the consideration of the node distribution and fusion overhead in terms of the energy consumption. By extending existing sensing model in the literature, we quantify how the sensing ranges and node densities of sensor nodes impact the sensing accuracy, and how it affects the fusion overhead and the sensing lifetime of the network. We identify the tradeoff between sensing accuracy and energy consumption in an analytical framework. It can be used to choose optimal parameters of sensor networks to meet the specified sensing or lifetime requirements.