Distributed Environment Monitoring using Minimum Volume Ellipsoid

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of small, battery-operated wireless nodes that are deployed in remote loca­tions. Due to the challenges associated with recharging these bat­teries, energy efficiency becomes a critical concern in WSNs. In the context of environmental monitoring applications, accurately detecting areas of interest is of utmost importance. Centralized WSN-based environmental monitoring methods typically rely on a fusion center (FC) to process the collected data, resulting signif­icant communication overhead. During environment monitoring, the nodes located near the FC rapidly deplete their energy , while other nodes may still possess ample amount of energy. To address this energy inefficiency, in this work we introduced a novel distributed method. It leverages the minimum volume ellipsoid (MVE) algorithm to calculate an ellipsoid that effectively covers the infraction area in a distributed manner. Furthermore, the proposed method employs Khachiyan's algorithm to optimize the ellipsoid's size. By transmitting the ellipsoid information to the FC, the power efficiency of the network is substantially enhanced. Through rigorous simulation-based experiments, the efficacy of the proposed method is thoroughly evaluated and verified. The results demonstrate significant improvements in power efficiency and energy conservation within the network.