Information Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks: a Tunable Reliability Approach

A key functionality of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consists in obtaining and transporting the information of interest (e.g., events) required by the applications. The applications running on WSN also specify desired reliability levels for the information. Consequently, reliability requirements, possibly changing over time and of tunable levels over an application, are stipulated on the transport of information. As the WSN environments are often exposed to perturbations, these specifically need to be considered in order to achieve the desired reliability on information transport. The existing approaches to reliable transport typically focus on maximizing the attained reliability levels than the more complex facets of reliability adaptation or tunability. These approaches thus tend to over utilize the network resources (e.g., energy) even when the application does not require enhanced reliability. On this background, the book develops a novel generalized framework for reliable information transport in WSNs. The proposed framework supports various applications, provides tunable reliability of information transport and copes with dynamic network conditions.