Boundary estimation in sensor networks: theory and methods

  • Authors:
  • Robert Nowak;Urbashi Mitra

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University;Electrical Engineering Department, University of Southern California

  • Venue:
  • IPSN'03 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Information processing in sensor networks
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Sensor networks have emerged as a fundamentally new tool for monitoring spatially distributed phenomena. This paper investigates a strategy by which sensor nodes detect and estimate non-localized phenomena such as "boundaries" and "edges"(e.g., temperature gradients, variations in illumination or contamination levels). A general class of boundaries, with mild regularity assumptions, is considered, and theoretical bounds on the achievable performance of sensor network based boundary estimation are established. A hierarchical boundary estimation algorithm is proposed that achieves a near-optimal balance between mean-squared error and energy consumption.