Reactive monitoring of aggregates in Gaussian random field over wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Monitoring is one of key applications in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we consider Reactive Monitoring in sensor networks, which takes the advantages of very low communication overhead. In this respect, our primary concern is devising the reactive monitoring mechanism with minimal communication cost for a sensor network scattered in a Gaussian field. We cast the threshold assignment for reactive monitoring as an optimization problem based on the statistics of each sensor measurement. Then, we propose a distributed algorithm to set local thresholds on each sensor node based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique. Through simulation, we illustrate that the proposed threshold assignment algorithm can significantly reduce the communication overhead of the monitoring mechanism in sensor networks.