RAPS: a precision‐adaptive protocol towards improved data fidelity in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Achieving high data quality and efficient network resource utilization is two major design objectives of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, these two objectives are often conflictive. By allowing sensors to report sampled data at high rates, fine-grained data quality can be obtained. However, the limited resources of a WSN make it difficult to support very high traffic rate. Therefore, the capability of adaptively adjusting sensor nodes' traffic-generating rates on the basis of the availability of network resources and application requirements is critical. This issue has attracted much attention recently, and some work has been carried out.To achieve high data quality and improved utilization of network resources, in this paper, we propose rate-based adaptive precision setting (RAPS) protocol, which works in a way that each sensor can adaptively adjust its traffic-generating rate on the basis of the current network resources availability and application requirements. RAPS introduces the following two key factors into its design: application's precision requirement and packet arrival rate. Analytical and simulation results show that RAPS can achieve improved data quality while reducing packet delivery latency.