Exploiting wireless broadcast in spatially correlated sensor networks

The objective of this paper is to exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless medium for energy conservation in spatially correlated wireless sensor networks. Since wireless transmission is inherently-broadcast when one sensor node transmits, other nodes in its coverage area can receive the transmitted data. When data collected by different sensors are correlated, each sensor can utilize the data it overhears from other sensors to compress its own data and conserve energy in its own transmissions. We apply this idea to a class of cluster-based wireless sensor networks and formulate the problem of optimizing the lifetimes of all nodes in each cluster. By optimal, we mean that any other policy cannot increase the lifetime of the node which dies first. We show that this optimization problem can be structured as a linear programming problem. We also propose a heuristic policy, which has low complexity and achieves near optimal performance.