Constructing Topographic Maps in Networked Sensor Systems

Topographic maps represent the delineation of features of interest in a terrain by means of contour lines. There are several benefits of maintaining topographic maps in sensor networks they can be used for resolving spatial queries, visualizing available resources in the network, and understanding spatio-temporal characteristics about the events being monitored. In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed construction of topographic maps in sensor networks. The contour lines in the map represent contiguous points (sensor nodes) in the terrain that have the same value of the measured feature. We propose an energy-efficient algorithm that constructs these maps in a distributed manner. We also discuss how the maps can be used for efficient execution of some common sensor network queries as compared to existing techniques. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated to be significantly better than the state-of-the-art in terms of overall energy and latency. Analytical inferences are validated through lower-level simulations.