Toward Quality of Information Aware Rate Control for Sensor Networks

In sensor networks, it is the Quality of Information (QoI) de- livered to the end user that is of primary interest. In general, measurements from dierent sensor nodes do not contribute equally to the QoI because of diering sensing modalities, node locations, noise levels, sensing channel conditions, fault status, and physical process dynamics. In addition, met- rics of QoI are highly application dependent, such as prob- ability of detection of an event or delity of reconstruction of a spatio-temporal process. Despite these considerations, traditional data dissemination protocols in sensor networks have been designed with a focus on metrics such as through- put, packet delivery ratio, latency, and fair division of band- width, and are thus oblivious to the importance and quality of sensor data and the target application. In this paper, we argue for sensor network protocols that are cognizant of and use feedback from the sensor fusion algorithms to explicitly optimize for application-relevant QoI metrics dur- ing network resource allocation decisions. Through analysis and simulation we demonstrate the application-level perfor- mance benets accruing from such a QoI-aware approach to network resource management in the context of a central- ized sensor rate selection mechanism for an event detection application scenario.