Balancing cost-quality tradeoff in cooperative ad hoc sensor networks

In wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, each node is capable of functioning using only its local information about the environment. However, such a node can reach only locally optimal decisions that may prevent the network from ever reaching the global optimum performance for the given application. To avoid this problem, each node needs to cooperate with others to gain knowledge about the overall network and environment properties so that its decision contributes to the networkpsilas global objectives.