[FRIAM] Sensor networks and self-organization

[Jochen Fromm]

I just came back from a 3-day Summer School on self-organization here
in Germany. Although it was about self-organization in general, 
and the participants were coming from all major German universities, 
nearly every member of the Summer School except myself was involved in 
developing software for WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks), mostly with 
simulations (using ns-2) or real hardware, mainly with German ESB 
nodes, see http://www.scatterweb.net/research_products/esb.en.html 

There were also surprisingly few discussions about the definitions
of self-organization or emergence. On the one hand this is 
a positive thing, since these discussions are always a bit like 
the debates at the first councils. At the first council of 
Nicaea for example, convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine 
in 325, there was a debate if the Son is of the same substance 
as the Father, or if they are only of similar substance. It is 
the kind of problem you meet if you treat abstract concepts in 
a wrong way as terms for concrete things. These debates appear 
from a practical point of view often as irrelevant, meaningless 
and unnecessary.

On the other hand I think that there is more to self-organization
than sensor-networks, although sensor networks are probably 
typical examples of systems that need self-organization: systems 
that are very small or very large, very distributed or very remote, 
etc. Yet even in sensor-networks real self-organization - which is so 
badly needed - is more a wish than a reality. Popular algorithms 
(for instance routing protocols like AODV and DSR) are often only as 
simple as possible and rely on flooding without any spectacular form 
of self-organization. Concrete attempts to realize self-organization 
in WSNs usually end in a cramp. All participants for instance agreed 
that complicated algorithms to determine the topology of large sensor 
networks would probably never work in practice, see the Video 
"Geometry-Based Reasoning for a Large Sensor Network"
at http://www.math.tu-bs.de/~ali/fk-geometry-mpeg4v2.avi
(attention, quite large - 113 MB - but still worth it)

So what do you think ? Are self-organization and sensor-networks
synonymous ? Is it the best area to realize self-organization,
or just another example where self-organization is hard to achieve ?

-J.