Cellular automata based models of wireless sensor networks

Large scale wireless sensor networks present interesting challenges in many applications due to a number of factors, such as, energy constraints, the dynamic nature of the network topology and various application needs. An important issue is how the sensor nodes can achieve efficient global behavior under distributed control mechanisms? One of many possible solutions is to construct a self-organized wireless sensor network to deal with this challenge. This paper presents an algorithm to construct a self-organized wireless sensor network based on two dimensional cellular automata that can provide better understanding for how local behavior at node level influences the overall system behavior and affect the system performance. Two types of Cellular Automata (CA) are considered; for the synchronous CA based system; the regular patterns are identified and discussed. To overcome some limitations arising from the use of a synchronous CA implementation an asynchronous CA is employed.