Energy-Efficient Timing Assignment of Tasks to Actors in WSANs

Minimizing make-span and maximizing remaining energy is usually of chief importance in the applications of wireless sensor actor networks (WSANs). The current task assignment approaches are typically concerned with one of the timing or energy constraints. These approaches do not consider the types and various features of tasks may need to perform, and thus may not be applicable to some types of real applications such as search and rescue missions. To this end, an optimized and type aware task assignment approach called type aware task assignment (TATA) is proposed that considers the energy consumption as well as the make-span. TATA is an optimized task assignment approach and aware of the distribution necessities of WSANs with a hybrid architecture. TATA comprises two protocols, namely a Make-span Calculation (MaSC) protocol and an Energy Consumption Calculation (ECal) Protocol. Through considering both time and energy, TATA makes a trade-off between minimizing make-span and maximizing the residual energies of actors. A series of extensive simulation results on the typical scenarios show a shorter make-span and larger remaining energy in comparison to when one of the three related approaches, namely, stochastic task assignment (STA), opportunistic load balancing (OLB), and task assignment algorithm based on the quasi-Newton interior point (TA-QNIP) is applied.