Cellular automata and object monitoring in mobile wireless sensor networks

Object monitoring is an important application of mobile wireless sensor networks. Several algorithms appear in the literature for different variants of the object monitoring problem. Most of them are either centralized or distributed. Algorithms for mobile wireless sensor networks involve many aspects not dealt with in traditional networks and hence mobile wireless networks can be viewed as an unconventional computation model. We design algorithms for mobile wireless sensor networks based on another unconventional model of computation namely, the biologically inspired cellular automata. We design a cellular automaton based algorithm for an object monitoring problem where initially a number of mobile sensors and mobile objects are deployed randomly in a dense area of the network and they are allowed to move within the network. Our main goal is to monitor the mobile objects by the mobile sensors as long as possible. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first cellular automaton based algorithm for this problem. We find that our algorithm can monitor a good number of objects constantly over time.