Sensor-Mission Assignment in Constrained Environments

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 consider new sensor-assignment problems motivated by frugality, i.e., the conservation of resources, for both static and dynamic settings. In the most general setting, the problems we study are NP-hard even to approximate, and so we focus on heuristic algorithms that perform well in practice. In the static setting, we propose a greedy centralized solution and a more sophisticated solution that uses the Generalized Assignment Problem model and can be implemented in a distributed fashion. In what we call the dynamic setting, missions arrive over time and have different durations. For this setting, we give heuristic algorithms in which available sensors propose to nearby missions as they arrive. We find that the overall performance can be significantly improved if available sensors sometimes refuse to offer utility to missions they could help, making this decision based on the value of the mission, the sensor's remaining energy, and (if known) the remaining target lifetime of the network. Finally, we evaluate our solutions through simulations.

Combinatorial auction-based multiple dynamic mission assignment

“…Recently market-based approaches were proposed [7] to model dynamic missions or a mission-asset matching problem, which seems similar to this work. Johnson et al [7] studied a multiple mission assignment problem for wireless stationary sensor networks where missions are modeled as static (i.e., all missions start and finish at the same time) or dynamic (i.e., missions arrive and should be completed by different times).…”

“…The task assignment problem has been well studied in the areas of UAVs, robot-to-robot networks, and sensor-mission (or task) matching in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [1], [6], [7], [10]. A market-based approach to model dynamic, distributed resource allocation problems was proposed in [11].…”

“…Johnson et al [7] studied a multiple mission assignment problem for wireless stationary sensor networks where missions are modeled as static (i.e., all missions start and finish at the same time) or dynamic (i.e., missions arrive and should be completed by different times). For static missions, they also used combinatorial auction theory, modeling sensors as bid items and missions as bidders.…”

“…Since nodes are stationary, only local nodes can be assigned to a mission. Our work differs from the approach in [7] in that we deal with dynamic missions in MANETs where each mission requires multiple nodes' participation, while each node also may need to execute multiple missions during its lifetime. Because of the MANET environment, asset allocation is no longer strictly local.…”

Location Privacy and Energy Preservation in Sensor Allocation Systems

“…In [6,7], the authors have considered several sensor-task assignment problems. In [7], the problems we considered are different from previous work since they consider multiple tasks with different priorities.…”