ANTS: Pushing the rapid event notification in wireless sensor and actor networks

Rapid event notification to a nearest actor is important in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) since actors can perform appropriate actions which sensor nodes are not capable to do. While WSANs inherits the typical constrains of WSNs such as energy and computation limitations of sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a rapid event notification algorithm named ANTS to accelerate the actor´s event detecting process while keeping the energy consumption of sensor nodes as minimum. The algorithm is designed to search nearby actors from the event side inspired by a searching behavior of desert ants. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve fast event detecting with neglectable additional energy cost on sensors side.