On Exploiting Spatial and Temporal Correlation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In densely deployed wireless sensor networks (WSN), sensor observations are highly correlated in the space domain. Furthermore, the nature of the physical phenomenon constitutes the temporal correlation between each consecutive observation of a sensor node. These spatial and temporal correlations along with the collaborative nature of the WSN bring significant potential advantages for the development of efficient communication protocols well-suited for the WSN paradigm. In this paper, a theoretical framework is developed to model the spatial and temporal correlations in sensor networks. The objective of this framework is to enable the development of efficient communication protocols which exploit these advantageous intrinsic features of the WSN paradigm. Based on this framework, possible approaches are explored to exploit spatial and temporal correlation for efficient medium access and reliable event transport in WSN, respectively.