Retrieval of the extreme values under deadline constraints in wireless sensor networks

We consider a problem of retrieving the extreme value among sensed data under deadline constraints in wireless sensor networks with potential applications to alarm systems. The sensed data is mapped to a score which we adopt as a unified measure of the relative urgency of the data. The objective is to retrieve the data with the maximum score. We propose fully distributed schemes for contention based medium access and data combining. The proposed medium access scheme uses a randomized back-off which is controlled based on the score of the data to be transmitted. Data combining techniques are proposed to further suppress unnecessary traffic and reduce contention. The key observation is that one should aggressively prioritize packets with high score, up to an extent that does not incur excessive contention in channel access. Designed to capture such aspect, the proposed scheme is shown to substantially decrease the latency of the retrieval.