  Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have enabled continuous monitoring of an area
of interest (body, room, region, etc.) while eliminating expensive wired
infrastructure. Typically in such applications, wireless sensor nodes report
the sensed values to a sink node, where the information is required for the
end-user. WSNs also provide the flexibility to the end-user for choosing
several parameters for the monitoring application. For example, placement of
sensors, frequency of sensing and transmission of those sensed data. Over the
years, the advancement in embedded technology has led to increased processing
power and memory capacity of these battery powered devices. However, batteries
can only supply limited energy, thus limiting the lifetime of the network. In
order to prolong the lifetime of the deployment, various efforts have been made
to improve the battery technologies and also reduce the energy consumption of
the sensor node at various layers in the networking stack. Of all the
operations in the network stack, wireless data transmission and reception have
found to consume most of the energy. Hence many proposals found in the
literature target reducing them through intelligent schemes like power control,
reducing retransmissions, etc. In this article we propose a new framework
called Virtual Sensing Framework (VSF), which aims to sufficiently satisfy
application requirements while conserving energy at the sensor nodes.
