Energy-Efficient Composite Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Composite event detection is one of fundamental tasks for wireless sensor networks. In existing approaches, typically, a routing tree is used to enable information exchange among sensor nodes and collaborative detection of composite events. However, such a tree is not optimal in terms of energy efficiency, because the relations included in composite events have not been fully utilized. In this letter, we propose a new type of routing tree called event detection tree (EDT) to achieve energy-efficient composite event detection. EDT reduces the amount of data to be transmitted by aggregating data in to events, at the cost of an increased distance in the data transmission to achieve such aggregations. EDT achieves a tradeoff of them to minimize the overall energy consumption. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms existing approaches and yields energy savings of up to 20%.