ActiSen: Activity-aware sensor network in smart environments

A sensor network, unlike a traditional communication network, provides high degree of visibility into environmental physical processes. Therefore its operation is driven by the activities in the environment. In long-term operations, these activities usually show certain patterns which can be learned and utilized to optimize network design. However, this has been almost unexplored in the literature. In this paper we present the design and validation of ActiSen system, an activity-aware sensor network in smart environments. ActiSen consists of three components: activity-aware sensing, activity-aware radio duty-cycling, and activity-aware and energy balanced routing. Experimental results from real testbed experiments and sensor network simulator TOSSIM validate that the activity-aware design of ActiSen outperforms existing methods in terms of resource utilization (energy efficiency, lifetime etc.) and system performance (data delivery throughput, delivery latency etc.).