A General Cost Function to Reflect Sensor Support for Application QoS

As wireless sensor networks gain increasing prominence for a variety of practical applications, design challenges arise due to the sensors' limited energy supplies and due to the application-specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Since sensors are usually battery-operated, and may not be rechargeable, protocol designers must look for energy-conserving mechanisms to prolong the network lifetime. Moreover, the sensor nodes are used for a variety of purposes, including data gathering (sensing), event tracking (processing), and communication/routing. Since different applications have different measures of QoS, much past work has looked at designing application-specific protocols to meet the specific QoS requirements of different applications. However, these protocols do not easily generalize, making it difficult to implement new applications for wireless sensor networks.