Cooperation Mechanism Taxonomy for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

A Wireless Sensor and Actor Network (WSAN) is commonly integrated by a large quantity of sensor nodes and a lower number of actor nodes which communicate throughout the wireless medium providing distributed sensing and executing specific tasks according to the events monitored in a specific area of interest. To achieve a balanced performance, a WSAN architecture must implement an efficient cooperative communication strategy to allow the nodes to collaborate in the optimal assignment of resources and to execute tasks with the lowest possible delay. Such collaboration must take place by exchanging information and generating negotiated decisions while trying to extend the WSAN lifetime. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of a coordination mechanism taxonomy for WSANs; this taxonomy provides a framework for the classification of coordination mechanisms designed for WSAN environments. Based on this taxonomy, we introduce the basic design considerations to take into account in the design of a coordination mechanism for WSANs. In addition a comparative analysis is presented to study some of the most representative coordination mechanisms proposed in the area of WSANs up to this date.