Abstract
Wireless sensor networks rely on the cooperative effort of the densely deployed sensor nodes to report the detected events. As a result, sensor observations are highly correlated in the space domain. Typically, multiple sensor nodes may report the same event. Consequently, redundant information may be transmitted by the different sensor nodes, leading thus to unnecessary energy wastage. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the spatial correlation and the number of reporting nodes by developing a new analytical model based on the theoretical framework of the CC-MAC (correlation-based collaborative medium access control) protocol (Vuran and Akyildiz in IEEE/ACM Trans Netw 14(2): 316-32912006). We show that the reporting task can be delegated to a small subset of sensor nodes without transgressing the distortion constraint. Building on this result, a simple spatial correlation medium access control protocol is then proposed to achieve further energy conservation and faster reporting latency than CC-MAC.