Communication Models for Monitoring Applications Using Wireless Sensor Networks.

David Scherba and Peter Bajcsy

Technical Report NCSA-ALG-04-0003, April 2004

In this paper, we address the problem of efficient, wireless communication between MICA motes and a personal computer. We present four high-level communication models for solving the wireless communication problem in wireless "smart" MEMS sensor networks. We establish the Asynchronous Memory Limited communication model as an effective scheme based on a series of experiments evaluated using a wireless information loss criterion. We provide an overview of lessons learned from previous work, the challenges we encountered, and the different experimental approaches used to evaluate efficiency of wireless communication models. This report presents not only our findings, but also future research directions.