Assigning Sensors to Competing Missions

Abstract

When a sensor network is deployed in the field, it is typically required to support multiple simultaneous missions, which may start and finish at different times. Schemes that match sensor resources to mission demands thus become necessary. In this paper, we propose centralized and distributed schemes to assign sensors to missions. We also adapt our distributed scheme to make it energy-aware to extend network lifetime. Finally, we show simulation results comparing these solutions. We find that our greedy algorithm frequently performs near-optimally and that the distributed schemes usually perform nearly as well.