Mehmet Can Vuran

Assistant Professor

E-mail: mcvuran@cse.unl.edu

Spatio-Temporal Correlation: Theory and Applications for Wireless Sensor Networks,

M. C. Vuran, Ozgur B. Akan, and Ian F. Akyildiz, Computer Networks Journal (Elsevier), vol. 45, no 3, pp. 245 -259, June 2004.

Abstract:

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are characterized by the dense deployment of sensor nodes that continuously observe physical phenomenon. Due to high density in the network topology, sensor observations are highly correlated in the space domain. Furthermore, the nature of the physical phenomenon constitutes the temporal correlation between each consecutive observation of a sensor node. These spatial and temporal correlations along with the collaborative nature of the WSN bring significant potential advantages for the development of efficient communication protocols well-suited for the WSN paradigm. In this paper, several key elements are investigated to capture and exploit the correlation in the WSN for the realization of advanced efficient communication protocols. A theoretical framework is developed to model the spatial and temporal correlations in sensor networks. The objective of this framework is to enable the development of efficient communication protocols which exploit these advantageous intrinsic features of the WSN paradigm. Based on this framework, possible approaches are discussed to exploit spatial and temporal correlation for efficient medium access and reliable event transport in WSN, respectively.