An Approach for Systematic Design of Emergent Self-Organization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are rapidly gaining attention since enabling a broad spectrum of novel applications ranging from vineyard monitoring to space exploration. WSNs may consist of up to thousands of nodes, which typically have limited recourses (computational, memory, energy, etc.) and are deployed in a dynamic environment where they have to continuously adapt to new conditions. Given the resource constrains of typical WSN nodes, the amount of functionality that can be realized at each node is also highly limited. Therefore, cooperation between nodes is needed in order to accomplish more complex tasks. These facts turn design of applications for WSNs into a challenging endeavor. A promising approach how to cope with this is using the emergent self-organization metaphor. Unfortunately most of the current designs using this metaphor are developed employing the ad hoc and trial-and-error method, which is inherently unsystematic, as well as, inefficient. In this paper we present an approach how to systematically design emergent self-organization for massively distributed embedded systems like WSN.