Self-Organizing Mobility Control in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks Based on Virtual Electrostatic Interactions

Abstract

This paper introduces a new mobility control method for surveillance applications of wireless sensor and actor networks. The proposed method is based on virtual electrostatic forces which act on actors to coordinate their movements. The definition of virtual forces is inspired by Coulomb's law from physics. Each actor calculates the virtual forces independently based on known locations of its neighbours and predetermined borders of the monitored area. The virtual forces generate movements of actors. This approach enables effective deployment of actors at the initial stage as well as adaptation of actors' placement to variable conditions during execution of the surveillance task without the need of any central controller. Effectiveness of the introduced method was experimentally evaluated in a simulation environment. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method enables more effective organization of the actors' mobility than state-of-the-art approaches.

Efficient Actor Recovery Paradigm for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

“…Some works presented in the literature manage to handle the actor node deployment and mobility [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ]. Nevertheless, they do not provide solutions in the case of the occurrence of actor node failure.…”

“…The study in [ 20 ] presents a framework for real-time data report and task execution (RTRE) which aims to achieve event assignment through multi-actor coordination and data collected coordination between sensor and actors real-time sensor-actuator data collection. The authors of [ 23 ] present a self-organizing mobility control in WSANs based on virtual electrostatic interactions which aim to enhance actor node deployment and control actors’ mobility. The main purpose of the previously mentioned techniques is to manage actor mobility during deployment or during event handling.…”