Exploiting agents for modelling and simulation of coverage control protocols in large sensor networks

A sensor network is composed of low-cost, low-power nodes densely deployable over a (possibly in-hospitable) territory in order to monitor the state of the environment, e.g. temperature, sound, radiation and so forth. Sensors have the ability to self-organize into an interconnected network and to cooperate for collecting, aggregating and disseminating information to end users. Major challenges in dealing with sensor networks are the strong limitations imposed by finite onboard power capacity. This paper proposes a lightweight actor infrastructure that is well-suited to modelling and simulation of complex sensor networks and, more in general, of multi-agent systems. This infrastructure is exploited for designing and implementing an efficient actor-based distributed simulation model for studying specific aspects of large wireless sensor networks. The paper proposes and compares the performances of two protocols for the coverage control problem that achieve their objective as an emergent property. In particular, one of the two protocols adopts a novel approach based on an evolutionary game. Distributed simulation of the achieved actor-based models is characterized by good execution performances witnessed by reported experimental results.