On Scheduling Sensor Networks

The emerging technology of wireless sensor networks (D. Estrin et al. 2001) holds the promise of facilitating a diverse array of real-time decision support applications in environmental monitoring, military deployments, and robotic explorations. Such networks consist of a distributed set of sensor nodes, each of which typically uses battery-operated sensing and computing devices and a low-power radio transmitter and receiver. These sensor nodes sense, compute, and communicate with each other to co-operatively accomplish, typically, a common set of tasks. Effective integration of computation and communication in sensor networks is a challenging problem that will draw from as well as contribute to the fields of parallel and distributed computing, network protocol design, and stochastic optimization. Aspects of this problem that are unique in comparison to traditional distributed systems include: