Task-oriented self-organization of ad hoc sensor systems

An ad hoc network is a collection of perhaps wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a network without the use of any pre-existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Resource limitations of sensors deployed in an ad hoc setting necessitates careful consideration of the choice of sensors. In this paper, a distributed task-oriented self-organization algorithm for sensors in such a network to organize themselves according to the task being announced is proposed. The proposed algorithm uses appropriate attribute vectors to describe the specifications of tasks and sensors. When a task is announced, a distributed leader election algorithm is used to select the sensor that is best matched based on minimizing a distance measure between the announced task and sensor specifications. The selected sensor then uses a task decomposition method to generate, and then announce, residual tasks that ´cover´ the matching error. In this manner, sensors are sequentially selected until all residual tasks are ´covered´. All sensors selected by the algorithm form a sensor group for the originally announced task.