Location-Aware Protocols for Energy-Efficient Information Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Advances in the miniaturization of microelectromechanical components have led to battery powered and inexpensive sensor nodes, which can be networked in an ad hoc manner to perform distributed sensing and information processing. While sensor net-works can be deployed in inhospitable terrain to provide continuous monitoring and processing capabilities for a wide range of applications, sensor nodes are severely resource-constrained; they typically run on batteries and have a small amount of memory. Therefore, energy-efficient and lightweight protocols are necessary for dis-tributed information processing in these networks. The data provided by a sensor node is often useful only in the context of the loca-tion of the data source. Thus, sensor networks rely on localization schemes to provide location information to sensor nodes. The premise of this thesis is that location-aware protocols, which are based on the assumption that sensor nodes can estimate their location, improve the efficiency of data gathering and resource utilization of wireless sensor networks. Location-awareness improves the energy-efficiency of the protocol