Battlefield surveillance formalism using WSANs

Battlefield surveillance have come into attention to address the issue of national security. In battlefield not only weapons or firepower is required but also an effective command, control system, intelligent pre-planning, and run time decision capability for the effective use of firepower and weapons to win in the war. This increases burden on the army and sometimes in spite of huge efforts they may lose the war. To increase the probability of success in a war Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks WSANs can be used in the battlefield because of their capability of sensing environment, intelligent decision making, commanding capability and performing action on the environment. Therefore this work presents a model for battlefield surveillance using WSANs. Quadrant-based clustering is used to increase the network lifetime. A quadrant consists of sensors, actors (robots) and a controller node for issuing commands. The controllers can communicate with each other to share the information of the quadrant. The proposed model for battlefield surveillance is represented graphically which exhibits the logical architecture. The graph-based model is transformed into an equivalent formal specification using formal specification language, i.e., Vienna Development Method-Specification Language (VDM-SL). VDM-SL is used because of its descriptive nature and effective power of modeling networks. The developed formal specification is analyzed through various techniques available in VDM-SL Toolbox which validates and verifies it.