Sensor relocation for emergent data acquisition in sparse mobile sensor networks

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Wu, Wei | Li, Xiaohui | Xiang, Shili | Lim, Hock Beng | Tan, Kian-Lee

Affiliations: School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore | Intelligent Systems Centre, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Note: [] Corresponding author: Wei Wu, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117417. Tel.: +65 6516 1424; Fax: +65 6779 4580; E-mail: wuw@nus.edu.sg

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of sensor relocation for emergent data acquisition (initiated by a base station) in sparse mobile sensor networks. We propose a distributed scheme called BRIDGE that relocates mobile sensors to fulfill an emergent data acquisition task with the objective to minimize the task completion time. BRIDGE gradually finds a sensor that is close to the task location and relocates that sensor to the task location, and at the same time relocates some other sensors to connect that sensor to the base station. BRIDGE exploits the encountered sensors during relocation, and handles the challenges caused by intermittent connections. Our extensive performance study shows the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Keywords: Sensor network, data acquisition, sensor relocation

DOI: 10.3233/MIS-2010-0097

Journal: Mobile Information Systems, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 155-176, 2010