QoI-Aware Operations & Management in Multi-Task-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, the novel area of the task-oriented, quality-of-information (QoI)-aware operation and management of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed and investigated. Driven by a runtime monitoring of the QoI levels provided to sensing tasks, the paper proposes a task admission and WSN resource utilization procedures to control the overall QoI levels provided to new and existing tasks. The paper describes the key design elements in support of the proposed approach, namely: (a) the QoI satisfaction index of task, which quantifies the degree to which the required QoI is satisfied by the WSN; (b) the QoIcentric sensor network capacity, which expresses the ability of the WSN to host a new task (with specific QoI requirements) without sacrificing the QoI of other currently hosted tasks; (c) a negotiation-based admission control process that relies on iteratively reconfiguring and optimizing the usage of network resources and the degree of QoI acceptance of prioritized sensing tasks; and (d) a resource allocation method to optimally allocate network resources for running and new tasks. Finally, extensive performance results are provided for assessing the performance of the proposed approach for the case of an intruder detection use scenario.