Self-organising Sensor networks.

Sensor Networks consist of a large number of low-cost low-power devices, each with sufficient hardware to monitor one or more variables and send and receive the readings for these variables to other devices. Wireless sensor networks are becoming a powerful tool for monitoring a range of diverse situations. While the devices themselves are mostly still in the prototype stage the theory surrounding these devices is a fast moving area of research. Ad-Hoc networks are a collection of mobile devices with wireless networking capability that may form a temporary peer to peer, multi-hop network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralised administration. Sensor networks typically make use of ad-hoc networking, but normally lack the processing power to utilize the full richness of many proposed ad-hoc network protocols

A Biologically-Inspired Clustering Algorithm Dependent on Spatial Data in Sensor Networks.

Sensor networks in environmental monitoring applications aim to provide scientists with a useful spatio-temporal representation of the observed phenomena. This helps to deepen their understanding of the environmental signals that cover large geographic areas. In this paper, the spatial aspect of this data handling requirement is met by creating clusters in a sensor network based on the rate of change of an oceanographic signal with respect to space. Inspiration was drawn from quorum sensing, a biological process that is carried out within communities of bacterial cells. The paper demonstrates the control the user has over the sensitivity of the algorithm to the data variation and the energy consumption of the nodes while they run the algorithm

A Weakly Coupled Adaptive Gossip Protocol for Application Level Active Networks.

With the sharp increase in heterogeneity and distribution of elements in wide-area networks, more flexible, efficient and autonomous approaches for management and information distribution are needed. This paper proposes a novel approach, based on gossip protocols and firefly synchronisation theory, for the management policy distribution and synchronisation over a number of nodes in an Application Level Active Network (ALAN). The work is presented in the context of the IST project ANDROID (Active Network Distributed Open Infrastructure Development), which is developing an autonomous policy-based management system for ALAN. The preliminary simulation results suggest that with the appropriately optimised parameters, the algorithms developed are scalable, can work effectively in a realistic random network, and allow the policy updates to be distributed efficiently throughout the active network with a lower latency than other similar types of gossip protocols