An energy-aware approach for sensor data communication

Communication is an important factor in determining the energy consumption in distributed sensor applications [4]. Energy consumed by transmitting data wirelessly over 10 to 100m range has been found to consume as much energy as thousands of operations. Further, the overwhelming volume of sensed information and the need to aggregate data from the different sensed nodes for detecting events of interest leads to a large number of communications across the different nodes. In order to reduce the number of communications, many prior approaches limit the communication to within a set of local nodes called a cluster. These clusters support some local processing of the sensed data and extract some useful information and limit the communication to the nodes outside the cluster to this extracted information. For example in a distributed sensor network that detects a vehicle and its possible route, a node that senses an event communicates with other neighboring nodes in its cluster. The information gathered locally in the cluster is used to calculate the position of an event and its possible route. Then this information is forwarded to the next cluster [5].