Dynamic collaborative processing based on event-driven task allocation in wireless sensor and actuator networks

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) can be seen as the backbone of control applications. Sensor nodes are involved in gathering information about the physical phenomenon, while actuator nodes take decisions and then perform appropriate actions upon the environment. To execute the actions at all part of the region in an effective manner, multiple coordination mechanisms among nodes are required. This paper describes the collaborative sensing and action algorithm for environment control in WSANs. First, an actuator relocation algorithm based on regional controllability is adopted after an initial random placement of actuator nodes. Then, a strategy is proposed to assign tasks to actuator nodes and control their action in a coordinated way to accomplish the tasks based on the characteristics of the events. Finally, we formulate the collaborative processing problem as an optimization problem and utilize genetic algorithm to calculate the control law for actuator nodes. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.