An Ecosystem Model for Massively-Deployed Sensor Networks

Research in wireless sensor network technology has accelerated rapidly in the last decade. Promises of ubiquitous control of the physical environment by these networks open avenues for new applications that will redefine the way we live and work. Due to the small size and low cost of sensor devices, visionaries promise systems enabled by deployment of massive numbers of sensors working in concert. Recent sensor network research has concentrated on developing techniques for performing relatively simple tasks with minimal energy expense, assuming some form of centralized control Unfortunately, centralized control does not scale to massive size networks and execution of simple tasks in sparse networks will not lead to the sophisticated applications predicted. The contribution of this work is to continue our work in looking at massively-deployed sensor networks, motivated by lessons learned from the way biological ecosystems are organized. We demonstrate that in such a model, fully distributed synchronization can be performed in a scalable fashion in massively deployed sensor networks, where individual motes operate based on local information, making local decisions that are aggregated across the network to achieve a globally-meaningful effect.