Challenges for Cooperative Wireless Sensor Networks in Border Control Applications

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network of low-size and low-complexity devices that senses the environment and communicate the gathered data through wireless channels. The sensors sense the environment, and send data to a control unit for processing and decisions. The data is forwarded via multiple hops or is relayed to another network through a gateway. WSNs have a wide range of applications from monitoring the environment and surveillance, to precision agriculture, and from biomedical to structural and infrastructure health monitoring. One of the important application domains of wireless sensor networks is in the military. Technological advances in the past decades have resulted in small, inexpensive and powerful sensors with embedded processing and radio networking capability. Distributed cooperative smart sensor devices networked through radio links and deployed in large numbers provide enormous opportunities. For border control applications, these sensors can be deployed on the ground and control and monitor borders. In this chapter, the challenges of the usage of WSNs for border control and monitoring are explained and cutting-edge technologies for these applications are discussed. Cooperation between nodes of a WSN will increase the performance in tasks like detecting, localisation or tracking intruders in border control. Game theory is used to describe how and why coalitions of nodes in a network form, using the trade-off between the advantage of cooperation (in terms of better performance) and the costs of cooperation (in terms of bandwidth, transmitting information). A general game-theoretic framework for WSN is presented, and illustrated by means of an example.