The distributed infectious disease model and its application to collaborative sensor wakeup of wireless sensor networks

The distributed node wakeup of wireless sensor networks is in the scope of collaborative optimization. Our recently-proposed artificial ant-colony (AAC) wakeup method for sensing modules (SMs) shows that the biologically-inspired idea is promising in significantly decreasing energy consumption while remaining the similar sensing performance, compared with the classical methods. However, the AAC method is hardly extended to the joint wakeup of SMs and communication modules (CMs) because the pheromone in the AAC cannot discern information from SMs or CMs. In other words, a novel biologically-inspired mechanism is needed. Inspired by the mechanism of disease propagation, a distributed infectious disease model (DIDM) is proposed including four sub-processes: direct infection, cross-infection immunity/immune deficiency, cross infection, and virus accumulation. Moreover, the DIDM based wakeup method is derived through establishing the correspondence between sensor wakeup and disease propagation. Besides, one theorem about parameter design is presented, exploiting the relationship among sensor properties, communication properties, performance requirements and the method parameters. The target-tracking simulation shows the effectiveness of our method. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.