Low latency event boundary detection in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In many real life applications of WSN, to monitor a wide inaccessible area, a large number of sensor nodes are deployed randomly over the region. When an event occurs, to identify the affected area immediately, it is necessary that the data and the locations of the affected nodes are reported to the sink node with minimum latency. In this paper, for 2D region, using some light-weight distributed in-node processing, a reduced set of boundary nodes are identified, which report to the sink node following the proposed routing strategy to minimize the latency. Simulation results show that compared to the earlier works, the proposed algorithm performs better in terms of the number of boundary nodes to be reported, accuracy of the estimated area and the packet latency with less neighborhood information and without any dependency on sensed data.