Distributed Constraint Satisfaction in a Wireless Sensor Tracking System
Ramón Béjar, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Carla Pedro Gomes · 2001
This paper describes our ongoing work on an in-teresting distributed constraint satisfaction problem (DCSP), SensorCSP, that is based on a system of wireless sensors tracking multiple mobile nodes. We present some preliminary results showing that the source of combinatorial complexity in this problem is closely linked to the level of communication in the system. This DCSP lends itself naturally to two mod-els- one in which agents are associated with the sen-sors, and one in which agents are associated with the mobile nodes. We show that these models are duals of each other, and discuss how they differ in the num-ber of intra and inter-agent constraints and how this might affect the cost of finding a distributed solution. We also suggest that a careful distinction must be made between explicit and implicit inter-agent con-straints in this problem domain as this might affect the communication costs and the scalability of a dis-tributed solution. 1