An efficient event handling protocol for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

A critical issue dealt with in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) is the real time response of actors to events occurring in the network area. The fast notification of actors from Sensor Nodes (SNs) about the events as well as the effective coordination of actors for prompt event handling is most important in these networks. In this paper, we introduce a distributed protocol for effective event handling in a WSAN. Existing approaches mainly favoring actors near the current event for handling it, may lead to highly ineffective solutions for certain worst-case scenarios. Through a randomized approach, our solution also selects distant actors for handling events, and guarantees fast average responsiveness to events and a balanced energy distribution among actors. In addition, it features efficient distributed algorithms for sensor to actor and actor to actor coordination which are of independent interest.