Active node determination for correlated data gathering in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor network applications where data gathered by different sensor nodes is correlated, not all sensor nodes need to be active for the wireless sensor network to be functional. However, the sensor nodes that are selected as active should form a connected wireless network in order to transmit the collected correlated data to the data gathering node. The problem of determining a set of active sensor nodes in a correlated data environment for a fully operational wireless sensor network can be formulated as an instance of the connected correlation-dominating set problem. In this work, our contribution is twofold; we propose an effective and runtime efficient iterative improvement heuristic to solve the active sensor node determination problem and a benefit function that aims to minimize the number of active sensor nodes while maximizing the residual energy levels of the selected active sensor nodes. Extensive simulations we performed show that the proposed approach can achieve a good performance in terms of both network lifetime and runtime efficiency.