A Learning-Based Approach to Confident Event Detection in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network applications, such as those for natural disaster warning, vehicular traffic monitoring, and surveillance, have stringent accuracy requirements for detecting or classifying events and demand long system lifetimes. Through quantitative study, we show that existing event detection approaches are challenged to explore the sensing capability of a deployed system and choose the right sensors to meet user-specified accuracy. Event detection systems are also challenged to provide a generic system that efficiently adapts to environmental dynamics and works easily with a range of applications, machine learning approaches, and sensor modalities. Consequently, we propose Watchdog, a modality-agnostic event detection framework that clusters the right sensors to meet user-specified detection accuracy during runtime while significantly reducing energy consumption. Watchdog can use different machine learning techniques to learn the sensing capability of a heterogeneous sensor deployment and meet accuracy requirements. To address environmental dynamics and ensure energy savings, Watchdog wakes up and puts to sleep sensors as needed to meet user-specified accuracy. Through evaluation with real vehicle detection trace data and a building traffic monitoring testbed of IRIS motes, we demonstrate the superior performance of Watchdog over existing solutions in terms of meeting user-specified detection accuracy, energy savings, and environmental adaptability.