Population estimation for resource inventory applications over sensor networks

Abstract

The growing advance in wireless communications and electronics makes the development of low-cost and low-power sensors possible. These sensors are usually small in size and are able to communicate with other sensors in short distances wirelessly. A sensor network consists of a number of sensors which cooperates with one another to accomplish some tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of resource inventory applications, which means a class of applications involving population calculation of a specific species or object type. To reduce energy consumption, each sensor only reports the number of sensed objects to the server, and the server will estimate the object number according to the received reports of all sensors. To address this problem, we design in this paper a population estimation algorithm, called algorithm Estimation, to estimate the object numbers. Several experiments are conducted to measure the performance of algorithm Estimation. The experimental results show that algorithm Estimation is able to obtain closer approximations of object numbers than prior algorithms.