In this paper, based on the information entropy and spatio-temporal correlation of sensing nodes in the Internet of Things (IoT), a Spatio-temporal Scope Information Model (SSIM) is proposed to quantify the scope of the valuable information of sensor data. Specifically, the valuable information of sensor data decays with space and time, which can be used to guide the system to make efficient sensor activation scheduling decisions for regional sensing accuracy. A simple sensing and monitoring system with three sensor nodes is investigated in this paper, and a single-step scheduling decision mechanism is proposed for the optimization problem of maximizing valuable information acquisition and efficient sensor activation scheduling in the sensed region. Regarding the above mechanism, the scheduling results and approximate numerical bounds on the node layout between different scheduling results are obtained through theoretical analyses, which are consistent with simulation. In addition, a long-term decision mechanism is also proposed for the aforementioned optimization issues, where the scheduling results with different node layouts are derived by modeling as a Markov decision process and utilizing the Q-learning algorithm. Concerning the above two mechanisms, the performance of both is verified by conducting experiments using the relative humidity dataset; furthermore, the differences in performance and limitations of the model are discussed and summarized.
Keywords: internet of things; sensor scheduling; spatio-temporal correlation; spatio-temporal scope information model.