Sensor-Mission Assignment in Wireless Sensor Networks

When a sensor network is deployed, it is typically required to support multiple simultaneous missions. Schemes that assign sensing resources to missions thus become necessary. In this article, we formally define the sensor-mission assignment problem and discuss some of its variants. In its most general form, this problem is NP-hard. We propose algorithms for the different variants, some of which include approximation guarantees. We also propose distributed algorithms to assign sensors to missions which we adapt to include energy-awareness to extend network lifetime. Finally, we show comprehensive simulation results comparing these solutions to an upper bound on the optimal solution.