A Measure for Integration and Its Application to Sensor Networks

Systems are often designed in order to integrate various subsystems. While system designers have a tacit understanding of what integration is, the concept is difficult to formalize. In this paper we propose a measure of integration. In the case of pairwise integration, we suggest a function of the time to communicate information, which is related to latency. Considering integration across many subsystems in a network, we describe a measure of overall network utility, a sum of an exponential function of pairwise time-to-communicate measurements. This allows a measure of the integration of already integrated subsystems; this function is also consistent at the limit with Metcalfe’s law. We consider the application of this measure to the integration of sensor networks. We suggest how the idea might be applied to higher level systems