Cellular Automata Based

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10.1109/TVT.2014.2303803, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. XX, NO. X, XX 2014 1
Cellular Automata based Node Scheduling Control
for Wireless Sensor Networks
Heejung Byun, Member, IEEE, and Junglok Yu
AbstractWireless sensor networks (WSNs) generally consist
of densely deployed sensor nodes that depend on batteries for
energy. Having a large number of densely deployed sensor
nodes causes energy waste and high redundancy in sensor
data transmissions. The problems of power limitation and high
redundancy in sensing coverage can be solved by appropriate
scheduling of node activity among sensor nodes. In this paper,
we propose a cellular automata based node scheduling algorithm
for prolonging network lifetime with a balance of energy savings
among nodes while achieving high coverage quality. Based on a
cellular automata framework, we propose a new mathematical
model for the node scheduling algorithm. The proposed algorithm
uses local interaction based on environmental state signaling for
making scheduling decisions. We analyze the system behavior and
derive steady states of the proposed system. Simulation results
show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing protocols
by providing energy balance with signicant energy savings while
maintaining sensing coverage quality.
Index TermsCellular automata, energy-efciency, coverage,
node scheduling, wireless sensor networks.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) connect devices that can
sense and monitor different physical phenomena for various
applications, such as target tracking, infrastructure security,
battleeld surveillance, health monitoring, and trafc con-
trol. WSNs are generally comprised of a large number of
tiny battery-powered sensor nodes. Accordingly, the serious
challenges in deploying WSNs are related to their sheer size
and energy limitations. First, conserving energy to maximize
network lifetime is a critical issue in WSNs. Existing medium
access control (MAC) protocols for WSNs have been designed
mainly for energy savings [1]-[4]. In general, network lifetime
can be prolonged by putting only a subset of the sensor nodes
into the active state and the rest into sleep mode. Specically,
topology control is mainly used to discover a minimum con-
guration of nodes for sensing and communicating tasks, and
thus ensure a longer lifetime for the network. Second, large
scale WSNs demand a high level of self-organization such that
each entity of a system makes decisions based on local interac-
tions with its neighbors [5]-[6]. Recently, the simple structure
of cellular automata (CA) has been receiving considerable
Copyright (c) 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be
obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org.
Heejung Byun is with the Department of Information and Telecom-
munications Engineering, Suwon University, Korea, e-mail: heejung-
byun@suwon.ac.kr.
Junglok Yu is with Department of Super Computing, Korea Institute of
Science and Technology Information, Korea.
Manuscript received xx xx, 2013; revised xx xx, 2013.
attention for the realization of energy-efciency and scalability
of WSNs [7]-[21]. In a CA, each cell is an automaton that
issues its state as output and takes as inputs the outputs of the
cells in the cells neighborhood [7]-[10]. Thus, the states of
these neighbors are used to compute the new state of the center
cell. This simple structure of CA has attracted researchers from
various disciplines. In particular, CA has been suggested as
an appropriate model in many applications, such as channel
assignment and topology control in mobile networks [11]-[21].
Energy-conserving methods based on CA [14]-[17] focus on
achieving a longer network lifetime through turning off those
nodes that are performing a redundant monitoring task for
specic periods of time. In [17], they propose a deterministic
and a probabilistic algorithm for activating sensors according
to the number of immediate neighbors. The solution presented
in [17] is based on the information of the geographical position
of the sensor and the neighborhood structure. However, this
approach works on a perfectly grid-based deployment only,
and thus is not practical in the real world. Topology control
based on CA [18]-[21] activates the network nodes only if
there are few neighboring active nodes; otherwise, they remain
idle to save energy. In [21], they consider a number of sensor
nodes as a block, whose states depend on the number of
active blocks in its neighborhood and their average residual
energy. However, the size of a block is an issue in a randomly
deployed sensor network. Most of the approaches proposed
previously are so heuristic that they just compute the new
state of the node according to the states of its neighbors or
decide whether the node will remain idle or turn to active
by counting its active neighbors. Furthermore, they do not
consider changes in local environmental qualities for modeling
the CA-based systems, thus they are incompatible with the
WSNs that are highly dynamic in terms of node behavior,
trafc, channel, and network conditions. In addition, they have
not been analyzed theoretically; these issues were discovered
only during simulations due to the analytical complexity of
these systems. Therefore, they could not estimate the behavior
or performance of CA-based systems accurately.
To address these concerns, we propose a CA-based node
scheduling method that maintains an energy balance among
energy savings while achieving good coverage quality in
WSNs. The proposed algorithm uses local interaction based
on environmental state signaling for making node schedul-
ing decisions. Based on the CA framework, we develop a
new mathematical formula considering the changes of local
environmental conditions for coordinating the sensor node
state in WSNs. With the proposed CA model, we analyze
system behavior by deriving the steady states of the proposed
0018-9545 (c) 2013 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See
system. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section
II explains our network model, cellular automata-based node
scheduling algorithm, and steady state analysis. Our proposed
algorithm is evaluated against other node scheduling schemes
in Section III. Finally, Section IV gives the conclusions.
II. CELLULAR AUTOMATA-BASED NODE SCHEDULING
ALGORITHM
A. Preliminaries
The simplest kind of system that we can reasonably consider
as living is a biological cell. The most complex forms of life
are multicellular organisms, that is, structured assemblies of
cells. A multicellular system is composed of many copies of a
fundamental cell whose interaction produces a global behavior.
A cellular system is composed of the following elements:
cellular space, time variable, state set, neighborhood set, and
state transition function. The simplest and most popular kind
of cellular system is the cellular automaton (CA) [7]-[9].
A CA is a lattice of cells, each of which may be in a
predetermined number of discrete states. In each time step,
every cell updates its state using a transition rule that takes
as input the states of all cells in its neighborhood (which
usually includes the cell itself). A CA is formally dened
as quadruples (C, S, N, f), where C denotes a d-dimensional
array of cells, S = {0, 1, , s 1} denotes the set of states
each cell may take, N denotes the set of neighborhoods, and
f denotes the transition function. The transition function f of
a CA is a deterministic function that gives the state s
i
(t + 1)
of the ith cell at the time step (t +1) as a function of the state
of the cells in the cells neighborhood N
i
at time t, that is,
s
i
(t + 1) = f(s
j
(t) : j N
i
). (1)
B. Network model
We consider a WSN consisting of M sensor nodes. Let
M= {1, 2, ..., M} denote the set of sensor nodes in a WSN.
We denote N
i
(i M) as the set of all the neighbor nodes of
node i and N
i
as the cardinality of the set N
i
. We develop a
discrete-time formula of the model where the controller time
is segmented into slots [t, t + 1), t = 0, 1, , with the slot
duration equal to
c
.
We introduce a local status indicator of node i, x
i
(i M).
At every control time, node i (i M) measures its consumed
energy, e
i
, and evaluates the value of x
i
as follows:
x
i
(t) = x
i
(t 1) + (g(e
i
(t)) x
i
(t 1)) (2)
where ( 1) is a positive constant and g(x) =
1
1+x
.
According to (2), as the consumed energy level of node i, e
i
,
increases, the value of g(e
i
) decreases, leading to a decrease in
x
i
. After evaluating the local status indicator, node i broadcasts
x
i
to its neighbors. We assume that the sensor nodes exchange
the values of their local status indicators with their neighbors
and that each node maintains a table that stores the values of
the local status indicators of all its neighbors.
Let
i
denote the activation indicator of node i. The acti-
vation indicator of each node is determined by comparing its
local status indicator with those of its neighbors. Specically,
after receiving input information of xs from the neighbor
nodes, each node determines with the following formula:
i
(t) =
i
(t 1) +
_
_
_g
_
_
_
jNi
x
j
(t 1)
x
i
(t 1)
_
_
_
i
(t 1)
_
_
_ (3)
where ( 1) is a positive control parameter. According to
(3), a node with a higher local status indicator compared to its
neighbors will itself have a higher activation level. Likewise,
a sensor node will have a lower activation indicator if the
local status indicator of the neighbors is higher. Increasing the
values of and increases the convergence speed; however,
large values lead to oscillatory behavior and instability.
Using the activation indicator level, each node decides its
output mode for the next time slot, i.e., active or sleep. The
output mode y
i
(t) is a function of the activation indicator and
of the threshold , which is usually subtracted from the input:
y
i
(t) = (
i
(t) ) (4)
where is a random value, following the uniform distribution
within [0, 1]. The transition function () is a step function
where
(
i
(t) ) =
_
1 :
i
(t) >
0 : otherwise.
(5)
If the activation indicator of node i,
i
(t), is less than ,
then the node will go to sleep. On the other hand, if
i
(t)
is greater than , the node will be active during the next
controller time slot. By synthesizing the dynamics of (2)-(5),
we observe that the activation indicator of a node becomes
smaller as the local status indicator of its neighbors is better,
that is, the probability of the node to be selected as an active
node becomes lower as its neighboring nodes are under better
environmental conditions. On the other hand, when the local
status of a node is better than those of its neighbors, i.e., its
neighbors are not as suitable as regards energy to be selected
themselves, the node is more likely to be selected as an active
node. In this way, only a subset of the sensor nodes remains
active while the rest stay in sleep mode, resulting in energy
savings.
C. Cellular automaton-based node scheduling
We propose our node scheduling algorithm (as sketched in
the previous subsection) based on the framework of CA. We
assume that a single active period occurs within a controller
time slot. The active period, T
a
, is xed and is the same for
every node. When node i determines its state to be active, it
stays in the active mode for T
a
seconds, and then goes into
sleep mode. Otherwise, it sleeps for the entire controller time
slot.
In order to represent a CA rule, we simplify the function
of (3) into the bipolar activation function:
i
(t) =
i
(t 1) +
_
_
_
if g (X
i
(t 1)) >
i
(t 1)
else if g (X
i
(t 1)) <
i
(t 1)
0 else g (X
i
(t 1)) =
i
(t 1)
(6)
where X
i
(t 1) =
jN
i
xj(t1)
xi(t1)
.
According to (6), the activation level of a node is adapted
according to the relative local status indicator values of all the
neighbors of the node so the value of g() converges to its
activation level. In order to describe the states of each node,
we partition the value of activation indicator
i
into ( + 1)
distinct elements:
= {
0
,
1
, ,
} (7)
where = 1/ and x is the smallest integer larger than x.
Then, the value of
j
(0 j ) equals (j ). We dene the
CA state set, S = {s
0
, s
1
, , s
}, with s
j
indicating that the
value of the activation level corresponds to the jth elements
of . With (6), we specify a simple CA rule that depends only
on the forward difference of the activation level of the updated
node. We assume that node i at time slot (t 1) resides in
state s
k
. Then, the next state at time slot t is determined by
the following transition rule:
s
i
(t) =
_
_
_
s
k+1
if d
i
(t) > 0
s
k1
else if d
i
(t) < 0
s
k
else d
i
(t) = 0
(8)
where d
i
(t) =
i
(t)
i
(t 1). When the next state of node
i is determined as s
, it decides its output mode, active or

sleep, based on the corresponding activation level
:
y
i
(t) = (
). (9)
This CA model is a discrete-time system with a nite set of
inputs, a nite set of states, a nite set of outputs, a state
transition function that gives the state at the next time step
as a function of the current state and inputs, and an output
function that gives the current output as a function of the
current state. That is, the state of a node is determined by
the states of the adjacent nodes with respect to the node.
However, this CA model based on the existing CA framework
does not represent events occurring at a state. Thus, the CA
model does not consider the changes of local environmental
condition in WSNs, such as energy consumption, for making
scheduling decisions. To address this limitation, we modify the
CA framework as a 5-tuple (C, S, E, N, f), where E denotes
the set of events at a state. Let us dene the event set E as
E = {e
g
, e
0
g
, e
+
g
, e
, e
0
, e
+
} (10)
where e
g
, e
0
g
, e
+
g
are the events representing that the value
of g() of (6) is updated and g() < , g() = , g() > ,
respectively. Event e
, e
0
, e
+
represent the decrement of acti-

vation level by , the maintenance of activation level, and the
increment of activation level by , respectively. Along with the
event set, we redene the state set of each node as follows:
S = {S
0
, , S
, S
g
0
, , S
g
, S
g
0
0
, , S
g
0
,
S
g
+
0
, , S
g
+
}. (11)
State S
j
(0 j ) represents that the level of activation
indicator corresponds to jth element of . State S
g
j
, S
g
0
j
, S
g
+
j
represent that the activation level is updated and g() <
, g() = , g() > , respectively.
The objective of the proposed algorithm is to alleviate
energy imbalance by stabilizing the activation indicator level
(a) case 1
(b) case 2
Fig. 1. Desired states : (a) case 1 and (b) case 2
of each node at the same value. According to the proposed CA
rule, each node adapts its activation level so that the value of
g() converges to the current activation level at the steady state.
We denote the activation level at the steady state as
p
. Then,
the desired states of node i are S
p
and S
g
0
p
where
p = {j :
j

1
1 + N
i

j+1
}. (12)
Then,
p =

1 + N
i
or (13)
p =

1 + N
i
1. (14)
Hence, if the value of

1+Ni
is an integer, the sequence
of events (e
0
g
, e
0
) will occur iteratively at the center of the

state S
p
and S
g
0
p
(case 1). Otherwise, the sequence of events
(e
+
g
, e
+
, e
g
, e
) will be iterated around the states S

p
and S
p+1
(case 2). Fig. 1 shows the discrete event model at the desired
states for two cases.
D. Steady state analysis
In this section, we analyze the steady state of the proposed
CA-based node scheduling algorithm. When each node resides
in the desired states of (12), we derive the following steady
states from (2)-(6):
x
i
= g(e
i
) (15)
i
= g
_
_
_
jNi
x
ij
x
i
_
_
_. (16)
We denote X
i
as the average local status indicator for all the
neighbors of node i:
X
i
=
jNi
x
ij
N
i
(17)
where x
ij
is the local status indicator of node j in N
i
and is
given by
x
ij
(t) = x
ij
(t 1) + (g (e
ij
(t 1)) x
ij
(t 1)) . (18)
Then, the dynamics of X
i
is given by
X
i
(t) = (1 )X
i
(t 1)
+

N
i
_
_

jNi
g (e
ij
(t 1))
_
_
. (19)
We denote
i
(t) = x
i
(t) X
i
(t). Then, the dynamics of
i
is
derived by
i
(t) = (1 )
i
(t 1)
+
_
_
g (e
i
(t 1))
1
N
i
jNi
g (e
ij
(t 1))
_
_
. (20)
From (20), we obtain the following steady state of
i
:
i
= g (e
i
)
1
N
i
jNi
g (e
ij
) . (21)
Since x
i
= g(e
i
) and x
ij
= g(e
ij
) at the steady state, we
obtain the following:
x
i
g (e
i
) = X
i

1
N
i
jNi
g (e
ij
)
= 0. (22)
It is intuitively clear that since 0 < x
i
,
jNi
x
ij
/N
i
< 1, for
any < 0, we can nd a number
0
such that for all 0 < <
0
the following inequality is true:
x
i

1
N
i
jNi
x
ij
= g (e
i
)
1
N
i
jNi
g (e
ij
)
. (23)
Then, for a sufciently small , the local status indicator
of node i can be approximated by the average local status
indicator for all neighbors:
x
i

1
N
i
jNi
x
ij
(24)
g(e
i
)
1
N
i
jNi
g(e
ij
). (25)
From (15)-(16) and (24)-(25), the activation indicator and the
energy consumption of node i can be approximated by the
following:
i

1
1 + N
i
(26)
e
i
e
ij
, j N
i
. (27)
According to (26), as the number of neighboring nodes of
a node increases, the activation level decreases, resulting
in a lower probability of being an active mode, and vice
versa. Consequently, as the number of nodes increases, the
proposed algorithm makes a greater number of nodes enter
sleep mode instead of active mode, resulting in much less
energy consumption. From (27), we also observe that the
energy consumption of each node converges to the same
value, i.e., the average level of energy consumption for all its
neighbor nodes. This balances the energy consumption among
all nodes.
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
A. Simulation conguration
In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed
algorithm, we develop a simulation environment using the
MATLAB simulator. To show the effectiveness of the proposed
algorithm, we compare it with two existing schemes, [19] and
[20]. CATC [19] proposes a cellular automata for topology
control scheme that activates network nodes only if there
are a few neighboring active nodes. In particular, at every
time slot, every active node counts its active neighbors. If
at least two neighbors are active, the node becomes idle to
save energy; otherwise, the node remains active. Every idle
node becomes active at a random moment and again performs
these processes. BISS [20] proposes a bio-inspired scheduling
scheme, a kind of adaptive selective on/off scheduling scheme
that uses local information to make scheduling decisions. The
performance comparison is based on four WSN metrics:
Consumed energy: The average of consumed energy on
all nodes.
Energy balancing index: The fairness of a set of con-
sumed energy values of all nodes. We use the following
fairness equation [22],
F(e
1
, e
2
, , e
n
) =
(
n
i=1
e
i
)
2
n
n
i=1
e
i
2
(28)
where there are n sensor nodes and e
i
is the consumed
energy for the ith node. The result ranges from 1/n (worst
case) to 1 (best case), and is maximal when all users
consume the same energy.
Coverage: The percentage of the area that is monitored
by the sensing range of all active nodes.
Active node ratio: The ratio of the number of active nodes
to the total number of nodes.
The simulation settings are as follows: The simulation area
is 100 m 100 m and the transmission range is 40 m. All
source nodes generate packets in a Poisson distribution with
an average packet arrival rate of one packet per second. Each
packet is 100 bytes and the controller time slot is one second.
We set the channel capacity to 200 kbps. The transmitting
power and sleeping power are set to 24.75 mW and 15 W,
respectively. All the nodes start with no neighbor information,
and therefore have an empty neighborhood table.
0 500 1000
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
(a) activation indicator
second

0 500 1000
0
50
100
(b) enery consumption and energy balancing index
second
m
W

0.6
0.8
1
node 1
node 2
node 3
energy : node 1
energy : node 2
energy : node 3
energy balancing
index
Fig. 2. Time behavior of the proposed algorithm: (a) activation indicator and
(b) energy consumption and energy balancing index.
B. Time behavior of the proposed algorithm
We show the simulation results that indicate how the system
behaves with the proposed algorithm. We use uniform grid
topology, where the entire network is divided into equally
shaped grids, and the sensor nodes are deployed uniformly.
Fig. 2 shows the behavior of the activation indicator, energy
consumption, and energy balancing index within a specic
period of time. In order to show the performance of energy
balancing, we set the initial power consumption of each node
differently; the initial power consumption of nodes 1, 2, and
3 are set to 0 mW, 10 mW, and 20 mW, respectively.
Fig. 2 (a) represents the activation indicator values of nodes
1, 2, and 3. We observe that, during the rst 400 s, the
activation indicator of node 3 has lower values than the
other nodes, which leads to a smaller probability of achieving
an active state. Since nodes 1 and 2 have relatively good
local environmental qualities in terms of consumed energy,
they achieve higher active status indicator values. In contrast,
node 3 with a lower active status indicator compared to its
neighbors is considered less t to be active, thereby going
into sleep mode more often in order to save energy. After 400
s, the activation indicators of all nodes become identical and
converge to almost the same value, which is 0.33. Therefore,
the probabilities of becoming active are almost identical for
all nodes, resulting in an energy balancing. Fig. 2 (b) shows
the energy consumption and energy balancing index. The
consumed energy of all nodes becomes almost the same after
400 s in spite of the difference in initial power among nodes.
This leads the energy balancing index to be maximized as
shown in Fig. 2 (b).
Fig. 3 shows the activation indicator level within a span
of time when the number of neighbor nodes changes during
runtime. We initially set the number of neighbor nodes of
each node to two and increase to three at 1500 s. At 1500 s,
one neighbor is added for every sensor nodes, and this causes
the activation indicators of nodes 1, 2, and 3 to decrease,
resulting in a lower probability of being activated. However,
the activation indicator value of node 4 becomes much higher
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
(a) activation indicator
seconds

node 1
node 2
node 3
node 4
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000
0
100
200
300
400
(b) power and energy balancing index
seconds
m
W

0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
node 1
node 2
node 3
node 4
energy balnacing index
Fig. 3. Time behavior of the proposed algorithm when the number of neighbor
nodes changes during runtime: (a) activation indicator and (b) power, energy
balancing index.
than the other nodes, because node 4 is a new node with a
relatively good energy state. After 4000 s, the activation indi-
cators of all nodes converge toward 0.25. Consequently, as the
number of neighbor nodes increases, the proposed algorithm
makes a greater number of nodes enter sleep mode instead
of active mode, resulting in much less energy consumption.
These results are consistent with the steady state of (26). Fig. 3
(b) shows the energy consumption of all nodes and the energy
balancing index. The consumed energy of all nodes converged
to almost same value, in spite of the differences in initial power
and the changes in the number of neighbor nodes. Therefore,
the proposed algorithm keeps the energy balancing index close
to 1. These results are also consistent with the steady state of
(27).
C. Consumed energy and energy balancing index
We use a simulation topology, in which the sensor nodes
are deployed randomly in a region that measures 100 m100
m.
Fig. 4 shows the average consumed energy on all nodes
and energy balancing index. We vary the number of nodes
within the range of [30, 100]. For different numbers of nodes,
1000 simulations are used to obtain averaged values of energy
consumption, so each point in the graphs represents an average
30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
110
120
130
140
consumed energy
number of nodes
m
W

CATC
BISS
proposed algorithm
Fig. 4. Consumed energy of CATC, BISS, and the proposed algorithm.
of 1000 executions. As shown in Fig. 4 (a) and (b), CATC and
BISS show similar behavior in consumed energy. The average
consumed energy for different numbers of nodes is almost
consistent. This is because the total of consumed energy on
all nodes increases with the number of nodes. Specically,
the average energy consumption of BISS is much larger than
that of CATC. In BISS, sensor nodes can be in sleep mode,
sniff mode, or active mode. Sensor nodes in sniff mode listen
to the communication channel for a specied time to collect
evaluation results of their active neighbors. According to the
evaluation result, sensor nodes in sniff mode will switch to
sleep mode or active mode. Since the energy consumption
in active mode is the highest, followed by sniff mode, the
energy consumption of BISS is larger than those of CATC
and the proposed algorithm. For the proposed algorithm, as
shown in Fig. 4 (c), the average consumed energy decreases
as the number of nodes increases. This is because the proposed
algorithm activates the minimum number of nodes needed
to cover the sensing area regardless of the total number of
sensor nodes. Therefore, as the number of nodes increases,
the proposed algorithm makes a greater number of nodes enter
sleep mode instead of active mode, resulting in much lower
energy consumption compared to CATC and BISS.
The energy balancing index is also illustrated in Fig. 5.
It can be observed that all the methods have a high fairness
degree of consumed energy values of all nodes, but CATC
and BISS show rather irregular behavior with varying numbers
of nodes. By comparison, the proposed algorithm maintains
a high and almost consistent energy balancing index for all
numbers of nodes.
D. Coverage and active node ratio
Fig. 6 shows the coverage achieved by CATC, BISS, and the
proposed algorithm. All three methods tend naturally towards
full coverage as the number of nodes increases. However,
the coverage of CATC is approximately under 80% when
the number of nodes is less than 30 and it does not exceed
90% until the number of nodes is 50. For BISS, over 90%
30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
0.975
0.98
0.985
0.99
0.995
1
energy balancing index
number of nodes

CATC
BISS
proposed algorithm
Fig. 5. Energy balancing index of CATC, BISS, and the proposed algorithm.
coverage is achieved when the number of nodes is over 40.
In comparison, the proposed algorithm shows that over 90%
of the coverage is achieved for all numbers of nodes. The
active node ratio is also illustrated in Fig. 6. For CATC and
BISS, the active node ratio is almost consistent in the mass
with varying number of nodes. This means that the number
of active nodes increases linearly as the total number of
nodes increases. This leads to CATC and BISS bringing about
highly redundant sensor data transmissions and energy waste
as the number of nodes increases. However, the proposed
algorithm shows a decreased active node ratio as the total
number of nodes increases, making the number of active
nodes constant irrespective of the total number of nodes.
Therefore, a greater number of nodes are set to sleep mode
instead of active mode, resulting in a longer network lifetime.
Considering all the results of coverage and active node ratio,
the proposed algorithm shows superior coverage performance
while reducing energy consumption by minimizing the number
of active nodes.
E. Effect of control parameter
We run a single hop scenario with three source nodes to
test the impact of the control parameters of (3). We set the
initial power consumption of node 1, 2, and 3 differently, i.e.,
0 mW, 10 mW, and 20 mW, respectively.
As shown in Fig. 7, the activation indicator of node 3 is
much smaller than those of nodes 1 and 2 because of the
difference in initial power among nodes. As the procedure
iterates, the activation indicators of all nodes converge toward
almost the same value. Comparing Fig. 7 (a) with Fig. 7 (b),
increasing the value of accelerates the convergence. How-
ever, a large value of leads to further oscillatory behavior.
Specically, the activation indicator with = 0.01 converges
slowly compared to that with = 0.03, but the oscillation
period tends to become smaller and the amplitude decreases
in the results. In contrast, the experiment with = 0.03
shows a fast adaptation of the activation indicator with a
rather oscillatory result. Therefore, the choice of the control
parameters can be approached as an optimization problem. In
30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
c
o
v
e
r
a
g
e

(
%
)
(a) CATC

0.45
0.5
0.55
a
c
t
i
v
e

n
o
d
e

r
a
t
i
o
number of nodes
coverage
active node ratio
30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
c
o
v
e
r
a
g
e

(
%
)
(b) BISS

0.53
0.54
0.542
0.544
0.546
0.548
0.55
a
c
t
i
v
e

n
o
d
e

r
a
t
i
o
number of nodes

coverage
active node ratio
30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
c
o
v
e
r
a
g
e

(
%
)
(c) Proposed algorithm

0.2
0.5
0.8
a
c
t
i
v
e

n
o
d
e

r
a
t
i
o
number of nodes
coverage
active node ratio
Fig. 6. Coverage and active node ratio: (a) CATC, (b) BISS, and (c) the
proposed algorithm.
the future, we plan to extend our research to the identication
of nd optimal parameters.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we proposed a cellular automata based node
scheduling control algorithm for achieving a balance among
energy savings while maintaining good coverage quality for
WSNs. The proposed algorithm is purely distributed; all
decisions by the nodes are performed locally by observing
their environments. Each sensor node interacts directly with
0 500 1000
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
second
(a) activation indicator with =0.01

0 500 1000
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
second
(b) activation indicator with =0.03

node 1
node 2
node 3
node 1
node 2
node 3
Fig. 7. Activation indicator: (a) = 0.01 and (b) = 0.03.
its neighbors and reacts to changing dynamics in their energy
levels and coverage. Specically, each node evaluates its
local status indicator based on its consumed energy level
and determines the activation indicator value according to the
relative local status indicators of its neighbors. Using the local
status indicator and activation indicator, we developed a new
mathematical CA model of the proposed algorithm considering
events occurring at a state. The proposed CA model makes
scheduling decisions according to the changes in local environ-
mental conditions as well as the states of the adjacent nodes.
Then, only a subset of sensor nodes becomes active while the
rest stay in sleep mode to save energy. With the proposed
CA model, we theoretically analyzed the system behavior
in the steady state. The simulation results indicated that our
proposed scheme outperforms existing scheduling protocols by
providing greater energy savings and energy balancing as well
as superior sensing coverage quality in WSNs. In this paper,
energy is the only parameter for determining node status. Other
parameters, such as delay, link quality, or congestion, can
be considered when toggling the node status between active
and sleeping. In future work, we plan to extend the proposed
algorithm to consider both the delay and energy required for
mission-critical applications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by Basic Science Research
Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and
Technology (grant number 2013053345) and also supported by
the GRRC program of Gyeonggi province [GRRC SUWON
2013-B5].
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Heejugn Byun received the B.S degree from Soongsil University, Korea,
in 1999, the M.S. degree from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology (KAIST), Korea, in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree from KAIST
in 2005. She was a senior researcher in Samsung Electronics, Ltd. from 2007
to 2010. She is currently a professor with the Department of Information and
Telecommunications Engineering, Suwon University, Gyeonggi-do, Korea.
Her research interests include network modeling, network controller design,
and theoretic analysis.
Junglok Yu received his Ph.D. degrees from KAIST, Daejeon, Korea in 2007.
He was a senior engineer in Samsung Electronics from 2007 to 2010. He
is currently a senior researcher with the Department of Super Computing,
Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. Korea. His research
interests include network control, cluster computing, imbedded system, and
parallel processing.

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, it decides its output mode, active or

represent the decrement of acti-

) will occur iteratively at the center of the

) will be iterated around the states S

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