Data censoring with network lifetime constraint in wireless sensor networks.

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), senor nodes are usually battery-powered with limited energy budget. The network lifetime is directly related to the energy consumption of each node. Online censoring is an effective approach to reduce the overall energy consumption by only transmitting statistical informative data. However, the network lifetime is not proportionally extended with online censoring, since individual sensor may still suffer from energy shortage due to frequent transmission of informative data or transmission over long distance. In this paper, a parameters estimation problem is considered in WSNs, where the goal is to minimize the estimation error under the network lifetime constraint. Two censoring algorithms are developed, which allow sensor nodes to make decisions locally on whether to transmit the sampled data. The proposed algorithms can extend the network lifetime with little performance loss. Simulation results validate their effectivenesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]