Interpolation for Wireless Sensor Network Power Management

One of the primary issues for any Wireless Sensor Network deployment is that of longevity of the network. The life span of the network must be maximized but the quality of the sensory data received from the network must not be compromised to any great extent. Current solutions to achieving this require the definition of a sensing radius for each sensor and a coverage level k. The sensed area is covered if every point within the area is inside the sensing radius of at least k sensors. When some points are covered by more than k sensors, it may be possible to instruct the surplus sensors to enter a low power sleep mode. This will conserve the energy of the network while maintaining the required coverage level. In this paper we propose a novel alternative to this approach based on interpolation. If the sensor network is capable of interpolating the sensed medium at a given sensors location to a specified accuracy, then we propose that this sensor is redundant and can be put into sleep mode. We evaluate our approach experimentally using live data.