Providing application QoS through intelligent sensor management

Wireless sensor networks are uniquely characterized by tight energy and bandwidth constraints. These networks should be designed to provide enough data to their application so that a reliable description of the environment can be derived, while operating as energy-efficiently as possible and at the same time meeting bandwidth constraints. These goals are typically contradicting and must be balanced at the point where the application is best satisfied. In this paper, we address the problem of maximizing lifetime for a wireless sensor network while meeting a minimum level of reliability. This maximization is achieved by jointly scheduling active sensor sets and finding paths for data routing. Simulation results show that network lifetime can be significantly increased through such methods.