Cluster-based Energy-efficient Composite Event Detection for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), well known communicating architectures today, are often used to detect the occurrence of some environmental events, such as pollution monitoring, forest fires detection, location and tracking, etc. In order to reduce irrelevant alarms, multiple attributes are used in the event detection process. In WSNs, communication is often by far more expensive and difficult to control than local computation within nodes. Therefore, it becomes critical to reduce the amount of data exchange within a WSN, in order to optimize the use of power and energy resources within nodes. Energy optimization is thus one of the most important aspects of the WSN design. There are already literature and projects dealing with the detection of composite events using data aggregation at intermediate nodes. In this paper, a cluster-based energy-efficient composite event detection (CEC) for wireless sensor networks scheme is proposed, which performs local computation at sensor nodes and local data aggregation at level of each cluster heads in order to reduce the communication overhead. Simulation results show that jointly, considering both local computation at sensor nodes level and local data aggregation at intermediate nodes will further reduce the total energy consumption and thus prolong the network lifetime. Keywords-Wireless sensor networks (WSNs); data aggregation; local computation; composite event detection.