Dynamic energy-aware sensor configuration in multi-application monitoring systems

A typical pervasive monitoring system like a smart building depends on an infrastructure composed of hundreds of heterogeneous wireless sensor devices. Managing the energy consumption of these devices poses a challenging problem that affects the overall efficiency and usability. Existing approaches for sensor energy consumption typically assume a single monitoring application to consume sensor data and a static configuration for sensor devices. In this paper, we focus on a multi-application context with dynamic requirements and multi-modal sensor devices. We present 3SoSM, an approach to optimize interactions between application requirements and wireless sensor environment in real-time. It relies on an energy-aware dynamic configuration of sensor devices to lower energy consumption while fulfilling application requirements. To bind together sensor configuration and dynamic management of data streams, we design a sustainable multi-application monitoring system architecture for pervasive environments that collects application requirements for sensor data streams and optimizes them into sensor configurations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, a set of experiments are designed in the context of smart buildings. We comparatively evaluate our approach to show how dynamic sensor configuration for multiple monitoring applications indeed outperforms the mainstream duty-cycling method.