Adaptive Sensing with Reliable Guarantee under White Gaussian Noise Channels of Sensor Networks

Quality of sensing is a fundamental research topic in sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an adaptive sensing technique to guarantee the end-to-end reliability while maximizing the lifetime of sensor networks under additive white Gaussian noise channels. First, we conduct theoretical analysis to obtain optimal node number , node placement , and node transmission structure under minimum total energy consumption and minimum unit data transmission energy consumption. Then, because sensor nodes closer to the sink consume more energy, nodes far from the sink have more residual energy. Based on this observation, we propose an adaptive sensing technique to achieve balanced network energy consumption. It adopts lower reliability requirement and shorter transmission distance for nodes near the sink and adopts higher reliability requirement and farther transmission distance for nodes far from the sink. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that our design can improve the network lifetime by several times (1–5 times) and network utility by 20% and the desired reliability level is also guaranteed.