Application-specific quality of service constraint design in wireless sensor networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is usually made up of hundreds or thousands of small sensors, for monitoring environmental changes or events in a given field. On the one hand, a WSN offers the advantages of self-organization, cost effectiveness, ease of deployment, and is widely applied in a broad range of military and civil applications. On the other hand, it has the limitations of low data rate, limited computing power, small sensing range, small transmission range, and limited battery power. Therefore, it is imperative to examine the fundamental limits and associated features of a WSN in performing its tasks. It can provide adequate guidelines in building a WSN with satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS). WSNs are usually deployed for various applications, and different applications may have different requirements. A general purpose WSN design can not fulfill the needs of all applications. Therefore, satisfying application-specific QoS WSN design is of paramount importance for practical sensor deployments. The aim of this dissertation is to outline the application-specific QoS constraints, and establish relationships between the QoS and the underlying network parameters. By analyzing and identifying the tradeoffs among them, optimal network parameters can be determined to direct practical WSN design. The topics covered in this dissertation include cost/energy efficient deployment in lattice WSNs, intrusion detection in heterogeneous random WSNs, intrusion detection in Gaussian distributed WSNs, range-free localization algorithm, and hops-based sleep scheduling algorithm. Directions for future works have also been outlined.