An Energy-Efficient Routing and Reporting Scheme to Exploit Data Similarities in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are based on a large number of tiny sensor nodes, which collect various types of physical data. These sensors are typically energy-limited and low-power operation is an important design constraint. In this paper, we propose a novel routing and reporting scheme based on sample data similarities commonly observed in sensed data. Based on reliable transport protocols, the proposed scheme takes advantage of the spatial and temporal similarities of the sensed data, reducing both the number of sensor nodes that are asked to report data and the frequency of those reports. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the communication energy consumption of a wireless sensor network while incurring only a small degradation in sensing accuracy.