Assigning Sensors to Competing Missions

When a sensor network is deployed in the field, it is typically required to support multiple simultaneous missions, which may start and finish at different times. Schemes that match sensor resources to mission demands thus become necessary. In this paper, the authors propose centralized and distributed schemes to assign sensors to missions. They also adapt their distributed scheme to make it energy-aware to extend network lifetime. Finally, they show simulation results comparing these solutions. They find that their greedy algorithm frequently performs near-optimally and that the distributed schemes usually perform nearly as well.