Maximising Sensor Network Efficiency Through Agent-Based Coordination of Sense/Sleep Schedules

In this paper we consider the problem of maximising the efficiency of a sensor network deployed for widearea surveillance, by coordinating of the sense/sleep schedules of power constrained energy-harvesting sensor nodes. We propose a formal model of the wide-area surveillance problem that we face, and theoretically analyse the performance of a sensor network (i.e. the probability that an event within the environment is detected) in the case of (i) continuously powered, (ii) randomly coordinated, and (iii) optimal coordinated sensors. We show that coordinating the sense/sleep schedules of the sensors can yield a significant increase in the performance of the network. Hence, we demonstrate that we can appropriately decompose the system wide goal of maximising the probability that events are detected, in order that we can optimise it using generic decentralised agentbased coordination algorithms (specifically, one based on the max-sum algorithm) that use only local communication and computation. We empirically evaluate our approach in a simulated environment and show that this decentralised algorithm is able to successfully coordinate the sense/sleep schedule of sensors, while attaining results close to the theoretically indicated optimum