Wiley Handbook of Science and Technology for Homeland Security, 4 Volume Set

DYNAMIC LOAD BALANCING FOR ROBUST DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING IN THE PRESENCE OF TOPOLOGICAL IMPAIRMENTS

MAJEED M. HAYAT

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Center for High Technology Materials, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

JORGE E. PEZOA AND DAVID DIETZ

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

SAGAR DHAKAL

Nortel Networks Inc., Richardson, Texas

1 INTRODUCTION

A new class of applications, based on sensor networks (SNs), has emerged in recent years. Examples of these applications are habitat monitoring, intrusion detection, defense and military battlefield awareness, structural health monitoring, and scientific exploration. These applications share a particular feature, namely, the necessity of collaboration among the sensors. Consequently, the idea of performing distributed computing (DC) naturally appears in an SN environment. In fact, DC is being performed in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in order to reduce the energy consumption of the set of sensors, make efficient use of network bandwidth, achieve desired quality of service, and reduce the response time of the entire system. These new applications have generated challenging scenarios, and the resource allocation solutions developed for traditional distributed computing systems (DCSs) are not appropriate under these new scenarios [1]. For instance, when DC is performed in a WSN, classical assumptions on node and communication-link ...