Next century challenges: scalable coordination in sensor networks

Networked sensors-those that coordinate amongst themselves to achieve a larger sensing task-will revolutionize information gathering and processing both in urban environments and in inhospitable terrain. The sheer numbers of these sensors and the expected dynamics in these environments present unique challenges in the design of unattended autonomous sensor networks. These challenges lead us to hypothesize that sensor network coordination applications may need to be structured differently from traditional network applications. In particular, we believe that localized algorithms (in which simple local node behavior achieves a desired global objective) may be necessary for sensor network coordination. In this paper, we describe localized algorithms, and then discuss directed diffusion, a simple communication model for describing localized algorithms.