Gossip Inspired Sensor Activation Protocol for a Correlated Chemical Environment

The energy conservation in chemical sensor networks is crucial as chemical sensors with air sampling to consume significant energy for sensing activity compared to that used for communication unlike other types of sensors, such as optical or acoustic. When considering the threat environment, the chemical tracers dispersed by turbulent motion in the environment display rather complex and even chaotic properties. Hazardous chemical releases are rare events. If all sensors in a wireless chemical sensor network (WCSN) are left in the active state continuously, it will result in significant power consumption. Therefore, dynamic sensor activation is essential for the durability of WCSNs. Dynamic sensor activation for chemical sensor networks using an epidemiology-based sensor activation protocol has been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a variant of epidemiology, gossip inspired sensor activation protocol of a WCSN in a chemical tracer field. The simulation framework with gossip protocol is validated against an analytical model. We then perform simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of gossip- based sensor activation protocol on selected performance metrics: number of active sensors and reliability of detection. We show by simulations that by varying the communication radii of sensors, we can achieve better energy conservation while maintaining better performance of a WCSN with a gossip-based activation protocol.