Autonomic Sensor Networks: A New Paradigm for Collaborative Information Processing

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are severely constrained in computation and communication capabilities due to the cost and size of available sensors. On the other hand, autonomic computing (AC) offers a promising solution to manage large-scale computing systems without human intervention. Realizing the similarity between WSNs and AC applications, this paper proposes an autonomic sensor network framework to enable self-managing wireless sensor network systems for collaborative information processing. In particular, a preliminary power-aware self-configuring and self-optimizing sensor selection scheme is developed to improve the performance and extend the lifetime of sensor networks. The simulation results confirm that the proposed power-aware scheme prolongs the network lifetime and balances the energy in sensor nodes