Trade-off between energy efficiency and report validity for mobile sensor networks

Mobile sensor networks (MSNs) have been widely deployed to provide a ubiquitous solution to real-time monitoring applications such as traffic data collection in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), ocean data collection in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), and biodata collection in wireless body area networks (WBANs). One major issue for designing MSNs is the energy-validity trade-off, that is, the trade-off between the energy efficiency for mobile sensors (MSs) and the validity of sensing reports. In this article, we propose a novel mechanism, Energy-Efficient Distributedly Controlled Reporting (E 2 DCR), to mitigate the energy consumption for MSs in real-time monitoring applications while keeping the sensing report valid. In this mechanism, we design dynamic sleeping adjustment (DSA) algorithms to adjust an MS's sleeping period using a heuristic method to reduce energy consumption. We provide analytical models to evaluate the performance of E 2 DCR in terms of the power savings and report validity. It has been shown that with E 2 DCR, MSs can report with less energy consumption while satisfying delay constraints for real-time monitoring applications.