Cooperative Data Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Introducing cooperation into a wireless sensor network (WSN) has gained much attention in the recent few years mainly because of the significant effect it has on optimizing energy consumption and on enhancing the lifetime and the overall performance of the network. Cooperation can be exploited at different levels, ranging from a collection of nodes collaborating to forward the data they gathered from the environment towards the base station through efficient data aggregation and clustering techniques, to nodes collaborating to report events occurrences, track targets or control the topology. Motivated by a large variety of attractive wireless sensor applications, such as environmental monitoring, smart environments and healthcare applications, we survey mechanisms that take advantage of cooperation among sensor nodes in the network for the purpose of delivering information reliably and efficiently to nodes of the network that are interested in receiving it. We provide detailed overviews and highlight the importance of cooperation from different perspectives.