Handling Mobility in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

In wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs), the collaborative operation of sensors enables the distributed sensing of a physical phenomenon, while actors collect and process sensor data and perform appropriate actions. WSANs can be thought of as a distributed control system that needs to timely react to sensor information with an effective action. In this paper, coordination and communication problems in WSANs with mobile actors are studied. First, a new location management scheme is proposed to handle the mobility of actors with minimal energy expenditure for the sensors, based on a hybrid strategy that includes location updating and location prediction. Actors broadcast location updates limiting their scope based on Voronoi diagrams, while sensors predict the movement of actors based on Kalman filtering of previously received updates. The location management scheme enables efficient geographical routing, and based on this, an optimal energy-aware forwarding rule is derived for sensor-actor communication. Consequently, algorithms are proposed that allow controlling the delay of the data-delivery process based on power control, and deal with network congestion by forcing multiple actors to be recipients for traffic generated in the event area. Finally, a model is proposed to optimally assign tasks to actors and control their motion in a coordinated way to accomplish the tasks based on the characteristics of the events. Performance evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed solution.