Adaptive Sampling for Spatiotemporal Anomaly Monitoring in Wireless Sensor Networks

Guoqing Lu, Yixuan Sun, Yiwen Jiang, Bernard Butler

Long-term environmental monitoring in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) often uses sparse sampling to extend network lifetime, but sparse sensing can miss short-lived, localized, and potentially diffusive anomalies. This paper proposes a sentinel-assisted adaptive sampling framework as a cooperative sensing-control pipeline for WSN anomaly monitoring. During normal periods, nodes perform sparse sensing driven by Kalman filter (KF) predictive uncertainty. During anomalous periods, continuously sampled sentinel nodes perform hybrid GLR-based detection with node-relative thresholds, and local detections trigger one-hop neighborhood wake-up with recovery-aware alert control. Experiments on the Intel Berkeley Research Lab temperature dataset with abrupt random spatiotemporal anomalies show that the proposed method raises the anomaly-window sampling ratio (AWSR) from 0.439 to 0.933 in the main experiment. It also improves AWSR over Adaptive Data Acquisition with Energy Efficiency and Critical-Sensing Guarantee (AAS) and Adapted e-Sampling while reducing total cost by 15.4\% and 2.1\%, respectively. These results show that integrating KF-based sparse sampling, sentinel GLR detection, and local alert propagation improves anomaly-window visibility while maintaining a lower sampling-cost trade-off.