  Future smart environments will be characterized by multiple nodes that sense,
collect, and disseminate information about environmental phenomena through a
wireless network. In this paper, we define a set of applications that require a
new form of distributed knowledge about the environment, referred to as
non-uniform information granularity. By non-uniform information granularity we
mean that the required accuracy or precision of information is proportional to
the distance between a source node (information producer) and current sink node
(information consumer). That is, as the distance between the source node and
sink node increases, loss in information precision is acceptable. Applications
that can benefit from this type of knowledge range from battlefield scenarios
to rescue operations. The main objectives of this paper are two-fold: first, we
will precisely define non-uniform information granularity, and second, we will
describe different protocols that achieve non-uniform information dissemination
and analyze these protocols based on complexity, energy consumption, and
accuracy of information.
