Reaction-Diffusion Inspired Sensor Networking: From Theory to Application

: Alan Turing introduced a novel Reaction-Diffusion (RD) model in 1952 to explain biological pattern formation found in animals. Since then, studies based on the RD model have long proved the feasibility of adapting it to spatial patern formation in distributed systems, especially in networking systems. In the past two decades, RD mechanism started being applied to Wireless Sensor Networks, and the possiblity of expanding to new applications is promising. In this paper, we first review the original RD model and further show its variants, known as activator-inhibitor models. Several research efforts on applying them to model tasks in wireless sensor networks will be presented and summarized.