Efficient detection of composite events in wireless sensor networks: design and evaluation

One of the most promising use of Wireless Sensor Networks is in the field of the event warning applications. However, depending on the communication scheme adopted, the amount of the exchanged data may be huge, with large energy consumption. In this paper we study the efficiency of two approaches to composite event detection in Wireless Sensor Networks. The first solution approaches the problem by collecting all the available information in a single sensor that performs the real event detection. If the area covered by the network is wide this approach may result inefficient. In the second solution, the sensors may exchange among themselves the sensed data and execute locally the event detection, with the advantage of propagating the sensed data only in a smaller area.