Advance Access publication on February 22, 2010 doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxq015 Resource Determination and Allocation in Sensor Networks: A Hybrid Approach

Many organizations depend on critical sensory information to achieve their tasks. As the number of those tasks increases, efficient determination and allocation of required resources in sensor networks become crucial. In this paper, we propose means to describe tasks semantically with their requirements and constraints so that software agents can reason about those tasks and determine what type of sensor resources they may need. Based on the semantic description and reasoning mechanisms, we propose a distributed agent-based approach to efficiently allocate sensor resources to tasks. Our evaluation of the proposed approach shows that not only it enables fully automated determination and allocation of resources for tasks, but also the resulting allocation is efficient and close to optimum