Improving the QoS for information discovery in autonomic wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are attractive for information gathering in large-scale data rich environments. In order to fully exploit the data gathering and dissemination capabilities of these networks, energy-efficient and scalable solutions for data storage and information discovery are essential. Traditionally, the communication pattern in WSNs has been assumed to be many-to-one; i.e., numerous sensors gather information which is routed to a central point commonly referred to as the sink. However, many emerging applications for WSNs require dissemination of information to interested clients within the network requiring support for differing traffic patterns. Further, in-network query processing capabilities are required for autonomic information discovery. In this paper, we formulate the information discovery problem as a load-balancing problem, with the combined aim being to maximize network lifetime and minimize query processing delay resulting in quality of service (QoS) improvements. We propose novel methods for data dissemination, information discovery and data aggregation that are designed to provide significant QoS benefits. We make use of affinity propagation to group “similar” sensors and have developed efficient mechanisms that can resolve both ALL-type and ANY-type queries in-network with improved energy-efficiency and query resolution time. Simulation and Analytical results prove the proposed method(s) of information discovery offer significant QoS benefits for ALL-type and ANY-type queries in comparison to previous approaches.