Placement, Coordination and Tasking of Static and Mobile Sensor Networks

Sensor networks consist of nodes that can measure characteristics of their local environment, perform computations, and communicate with each other over a wireless network. In recent years, advancements in hardware and lowlevel software have led to viable, medium-scale sensor networks consisting of hundreds of nodes that can instrument unstructured environments at an unprecedented scale. For example, the Mica2 “mote” (shown in Figure 1) can measure temperature, humidity, pressure, visible and infrared light, sound, magnetic fields, and acceleration. The most popular application of sensor networks to date has been environmental monitoring. In these deployments the sensor data is downloaded from the network for later analysis [19] or the network aggregates the measurements using simple local operations that compute, for example, averages, maxima, or histograms [13, 15]. When monitoring these spatial phenomena using a limited number of sensing devices,