A comparison of utility-based information management policies in sensor networks

We develop and compare the performance of two information management policies for wireless sensor networks. The first, sensor-centric utility-based (SCUB), is a distributed approach that instructs individual sensors to make their own decisions about what. sensor information should be reported, based on a utility model for data. The second, resource manager (RM), is a consolidated approach that takes into account knowledge from all sensors before making decisions. We evaluate these policies through simulation in the context of dynamically deployed sensor networks in military scenarios. Our results show that both SCUB and RM yield longer lifetimes than cases where no policy is used. However, SCUB produces comparable lifetimes to RM while reporting significantly more data.