DAMson: On distributed sensing scheduling to achieve high Quality of Monitoring

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are widely adopted to monitor and collect data, such as temperature, humidity etc., from the physical environment. Those sensor readings often exhibit strong spacial-temporal correlations, e.g., sensor readings from nearby sensors tend to be similar, and sensor readings from consecutive time slots are also highly correlated. As in our previous works, we first introduce the concept of Quality of Monitoring (QoM), and further define an utility function to quantify the QoM under different sensing schedules. In particular, the utility function is non-decreasing submodular function which is able to capture the spacial-temporal correlations among sensor readings. The objective of this work is to develop a set of distributed sensing schedules in order to achieve the highest QoM subject to energy constraint (e.g., under fixed working duty cycle). Extensive experiments validate our theoretical results. Notice that most existing works on this topic put their focus on centralized sensing schedule, which is shown to be extremely difficult to implement in large scale networked sensor system.