Many researchers have been attracted by a wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN) for its wide range of applications. In a WSAN, embedded sensors detect and conjecture environmental and personal conditions and actuators provide users with information services and environmental control which are suited for time, place, occasion, and people. Since it apparently is wasteful and redundant to deploy an independent WSAN for each of envisioned applications, building a multi-purpose WSAN consisting of heterogeneous sensors and actuators and sharing them among applications are considered promising. However, we need a mechanism to effectively share available resources among concurrent applications while taking into account application requirements and resources. Although there are several proposals on centralized or deterministic device assignment mechanisms, they suffer from difficulty in designing an appropriate set of rules with fine-tuned parameters. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed and self-organizing device assignment mechanism by adopting a response threshold model, which imitates division of labors in a colony of social insects. Our proposal does not require deterministic and complicated rules and appropriate device assignment emerges as a consequence of autonomous decision of individual nodes. Through simulation experiments, we confirmed the our proposal accomplishes as effective device assignment as an existing deterministic mechanism and our proposal is less sensitive to parameter setting errors.
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