Spatially-distributed wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely-deployed in Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as environmental monitoring systems, traffic and parking monitoring systems, and utility monitoring systems. One functional requirement of these systems is to capture anomalous or abnormal readings in the WSN and report these anomalous readings to a gateway with a time-bound latency period. This latency period is defined by the specific IoT application. For example, in some cold chain logistics applications, the sensor nodes must report anomalous temperature readings to the gateway within 1 minute. Short latency periods such as this significantly increase power consumption within a WSN because relay nodes within the WSN along the routing path to the gateway must continuously operate to receive, send, or route anomalous temperature readings to comply with the latency period. A continuously operating relay node may consume much higher power, e.g. nearly 4 times more power than an edge node in a mesh WSN in some configurations. For this reason, relay nodes can dominate WSN power draw and shorten its operating lifetime.