Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Old Dominion
University, Norfolk, VA, USA | Department of Science, College of Science and
Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia | Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science,
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
Note: [] Corresponding author: Ruzana Ishak, Department of Science,
College of Science and Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 54100 Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia. Tel.: +603 012 298 2650; Fax: +603 2693 4844; E-mail:
ruzana@citycampus.utm.my
Abstract: The phenomenal advances in MEMS and nanotechnology make it feasible
to build small devices, referred to as sensors that are able to sense, compute
and communicate over small distances. The massive deployment of these small
devices raises the fascinating question of whether or not the sensors, as a
collectivity, will display emergent behavior, just as living organisms do. In
this work we report on a recent effort intended to observe emerging behavior of
large groups of sensor nodes, like living cells demonstrate. Imagine a massive
deployment of sensors that can be in two states "red" and "blue". At
deployment time individual sensors have an initial color. The goal is to obtain
a uniform coloring of the deployment area. Importantly, the sensors can only
talk to sensors that are one-hop away from them. The decisions to change colors
are local, based on what the sensors can infer from collecting color
information from their neighbors. We have performed extensive simulations
involving 20,000 sensors in an area of 100 m × 100 m.
Our simulation results show that the sensor network converges to a stable
uniform coloring extremely fast.
