Sensor Networks With Mobile Access: Energy and Capacity Considerations

Sensor network with mobile access (SENMA) is an architecture in which randomly deployed low-power sensors are orchestrated by a few powerful mobile access points. This paper considers SENMA from energy-efficiency and information-theoretic perspectives. By allowing sensors to propagate data directly to mobile access points over multiaccess channels and relieving sensors from energy-consuming network functions, SENMA has the potential of offering orders of magnitude of improvement in energy efficiency over the multihop ad hoc architecture, as demonstrated by our analysis on scalability. Optimization configurations of SENMA such as the altitude, the trajectory, and the coverage of access points are considered next, using the sum-rate as the performance metric. Optimal strategies for single and multiple access points are determined. For multiple access points, the possibility of and the gain due to cooperation (i.e., joint decoding of signals received at different access points) are investigated.