Energy Efficient Cooperative Computing in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Advances in future computing to support emerging sensor applications are becoming more important as the need to better utilize computation and communication resources and make them energy efficient. As a result, it is predicted that intelligent devices and networks, including mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN), will become the new interfaces to support future applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to minimize energy consumption of processing an application in MWSN while satisfying a certain completion time requirement. Specifically, by introducing the concept of cooperation, the logics and related computation tasks can be optimally partitioned, offloaded and executed with the help of peer sensor nodes, thus the proposed solution can be treated as a joint optimization of computing and networking resources. Moreover, for a network with multiple mobile wireless sensor nodes, we propose energy efficient cooperation node selection strategies to offer a tradeoff between fairness and energy consumption. Our performance analysis is supplemented by simulation results to show the significant energy saving of the proposed solution.