Priority Sensitive Event Detection in Hybrid Wireless Sensor Networks

Traditionally, event centric Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications treat all events with equal importance, implicitly assuming that all events have same priority. However, in real world applications events may have different level of severity and sensitivity based on their cost of potential damage, occurrence location and frequency. Such applications demand that a detection scheme adopt differentiated treatment of events considering above criteria. Recent works proposed multi-modal sensor nodes for detection of different types of event in a single sensor network and mobile nodes for on-demand attendance of events. When a multi- modal WSN is deployed to monitor events of varied priority, major challenges lies to allocate resources and mobilize mobile nodes in an optimized way to maximize detection performance. We introduce the concept of varied priority and cost of mis-detection of events, and propose a detection scheme for multiple simultaneous events in a hybrid sensor network. Mobile nodes are mobilized through formulation of an optimization problem that maximizes the prioritized accuracy while minimizing detection delay. Theoretical and simulation results demonstrate that our scheme significantly outperforms other scheme that treats all events equally.