PAS: policy-based assistance in sensor networks

During the last one and a half decades, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have witnessed significant growth and tremendous development. While enjoying the wide variety of applications, the sensors in WSN have constrained resources, affecting their living lives, working times, assigned tasks, etc. Though a large number of efforts have been devoted into designing protocols that save energy as much as possible, they are still a passive solution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called policy-based assistance system (PAS) that addresses the issue of resource limitation in a proactive manner. Complementary to existing works which focus on saving energy in individual nodes, our proposed approach further allows sensors with limited resources to make requests to other sensors to help complete the tasks. In this way, the resources in the whole WSN are better utilized and more tasks can be completed with little communication overhead.