Ballooning: An Agent-Based Search Strategy in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Due to the actor mobility and duty cycle of sensor nodes, the data forwarding from sensor nodes to mobile actors is a challenging issue. Motivated by the research results in multi-agent systems, we consider the search packet as an agent moving in the network to search mobile actors. Then a strategy called ballooning is proposed to control the search process. The theoretical and numerical results show that the ballooning strategy can forward the search packet to mobile actors with bounded delay and efficient energy consumption.