Bio-inspired wireless sensor networks

Researchers are trying to apply ideas drawn from biological systems to computer systems, specifically to wireless sensor networks. The work is being done by European-based WINSOC, for Wireless Sensor Networks with Self-Organization. The main idea being explored is somethng called self-synchronization: the concept that individual cells, or in this case sensor nodes, can share bits of information to coordinate actions. (ZDNet blogger Roland Piquepaille has an overview of the project, and a group of related links.) One example given on page 3 of this paper by some of the WINSOC researchers, is that of the so-called ‘pacemaker cells’ in the human heart. Individually, each cell works as a “pulse oscillator,” which can be unreliable. But together, they become “pulse-coupled oscillators” that are highly reliable in coordinating the heart’s activities and responses to complex changing conditions. Biological systems can survive and recover from dying or damanaged cells. The WINSOC research intends to take this idea of self-synchronization, or self-organization, and apply it so that sensor networks can become more reliable and adaptable. “Our goal is to bring the mathematical models describing self-synchronization into a signal processing perspective to derive a novel approach to distributed hypothesis testing or estimation,” according to the paper. ICT Results, a site focused on IT research, has a readable summary of the WINSOC project. This clearly goes beyond the rudimentary “self-organization” of today’s wireless nets, which seem to be focused on self-discovery, connectivity, and in mesh networks rerouting around failed links or nodes. WINSOC seems to be layering a big chunk of intelligence on top of this basic stuff, creating something more like a distributed information processing network. Instead of each sensor node passing raw information to a core, it’s more like passing a lower level consensus about the data upwards through successive layers of an hierarchy, creating an ever more complete picture of a complex event, such as a landslide or forest fire, both WINSOC research projects.