Dynamic multiresolution data dissemination in wireless sensor networks

Recent years have seen the deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in a variety of applications to gather the information about physical environments. A key requirement of many data-gathering WSNs is to deliver the information about dynamic physical phenomena to users at multiple temporal resolutions. In this paper, we propose a novel solution called the Minimum Incremental Dissemination Tree (MIDT) for dynamic multiresolution data dissemination in WSNs. MIDT includes an online tree construction algorithm with an analytical performance bound and two lightweight tree adaptation heuristics for handling data requests with dynamic temporal resolutions. Our simulations based on realistic settings of Mica2 motes show that MIDT outperforms several typical data dissemination schemes. The two tree adaptation heuristics can effectively maintain desirable energy efficiency of the dissemination tree while reducing the overhead of tree reconfigurations under representative traffic patterns in WSNs. © 2006 IEEE.