Experimental applications of hierarchical mapping services in wireless sensor networks

The construction of accurate and efficient visualisations of sense data gathered from wireless sensor networks is an open problem. This paper presents a novel solution in which groups of network nodes cooperate to produce local maps which are cached and merged at a sink node, producing a low-resolution map of the global network. The sink node receives periodic map updates from each cluster-head used to refine an up-to-date global map. The global map gives a low cost interface used to target queries for generating detailed maps from a subset of the sensors in the network. Different map resolutions are adequate for different management applications to perform at a desired level. In an energy constrained network, it is preferable to allow the application to control the level of detail and topology coverage of a generated map. This work gives a complete system solution that solves global network data mapping problems through localized and distributed computation. This is acheived by abstracting and simplifying the routing and interpolation services of the network and turning them into services of the network rather than being the result of coordinating the services of individual nodes. This system changes the mechanism of use of certain capabilities in wireless sensor network; the interpolation service is used by the sensing nodes to deal with mapping data and a cluster-based routing algorithm in which the cluster heads are selected as the caches for local maps. This technique performs favourably against similar techniques which do not exploit such services of the network to generate maps.