A Cellular Automaton Model for Wireless Sensor Networks
Salimur Choudhary, Kai Salomaa and Selim G. Akl
Increasing the lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN) while maintaining good coverage is a well studied research problem. A cellular automaton is a biologically inspired model that has been widely used to model different physical systems including wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we use cellular automaton algorithms to optimize the coverage and the lifetime of a WSN. An advantage of the cellular automaton model is that its algorithms rely only on limited local information that can easily be stored in individual nodes. We consider a radius 2 neighborhood instead of a radius 1 neighborhood and consider different energy levels for different operations of the network. We compare different rules of this model with the rules of the existing model (radius 1 neighborhood) and we devise a probabilistic technique to solve the sudden falls of the coverage in these models. We develop cellular automaton based algorithms also for the object detection problem and present simulation results.
Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Cellular Automata, Neighborhood size, Coverage, Object Detection