Exploiting Sensing Diversity for Confident Sensing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks for human health monitoring, military surveillance, and disaster warning all have stringent accuracy requirements for detecting or classifying events while maximizing system lifetime. The authors define meeting such user accuracy requirements as confident sensing. To perform confident sensing and reduce energy, they must address sensing diversity: sensing capability differences among heterogeneous and homogeneous sensors in a specific deployment. They are among the first to explore the impact of sensing diversity on sensor collaboration, exploit diversity for sensing confidence, and apply diversity exploitation for confident sensing coverage. They show that their diversity-exploiting confident coverage problem is NP-hard for any specific deployment and present a practical solution, Wolfpack.