A Biologically-inspired Algorithm for Mission-critical Applications in Wireless SensorNetworks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) connect devices and enable collaboration on sensing and monitoring various physical phenomena for applications such as target tracking, infrastructure security, battlefield surveillance, health monitoring, and traffic control. WSNs are generally comprised of a large number of tiny sensor nodes that are battery powered. Therefore, existing medium access control (MAC) protocols for WSNs have mainly been designed for energy saving. However, existing WSN systems have considerable drawbacks, and especially limit coordination of sensor nodes for mission-critical applications, due to their large-scale nature. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and delayguaranteeing algorithm inspired by biological systems, which have gained considerable attention as approaches for computing and problem solving. We introduce both a local status indicator and an active-status indicator for a sensor node to represent its local environmental conditions and its node state, respectively, in WSNs. From consideration of the analogies between cellular signaling systems and WSN systems, we formulate a new mathematical model that considers the networking challenges of WSNs. The proposed bio-inspired algorithm determines the state of the sensor node, as required by each application and as determined by the local environmental conditions, and the states of adjacent nodes. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme provides significant energy savings, as well as reliable delay-guarantee, by controlling the states of the sensor nodes.