Deployment of distributed applications in wireless sensor networks

The increase in computation and sensing capabilities as well as in battery duration of commercially available Wireless Sensors Network (WSN) nodes are making the paradigm of an horizontal ambient intelligence infrastructure feasible. Accordingly, the sensing, computing and communicating infrastructure is set with a programmable middleware that allows for quickly deploying different applications running on top of it so as to follow the changing ambient needs. In this scenario, we face the problem of setting up the desired application in complex scenarios with hundreds of nodes, which consists of identifying which actions should be performed by each of the nodes so as to satisfy the ambient needs while minimizing the application impact on the infrastructure battery lifetime. Accordingly, we approach the problem by considering every possible decomposition of the application’s sensing and computing operations into tasks to be assigned to each infrastructure component. The contribution of energy consumption due to the performance of each task is then considered to compute a cost function, allowing us to evaluate the viability of each deployment solution. Simulation results show that our framework results in considerable energy conservation with respect to sink-oriented or cluster-oriented deployment approaches, particularly for networks with high node densities, non-uniform energy consumption and initial energy, and complex actions.