Profiling Aquatic Diffusion Process Using Robotic Sensor Networks

Water resources and aquatic ecosystems are facing increasing threats from climate change, improper waste disposal, and oil spill incidents. It is of great interest to deploy mobile sensors to detect and monitor certain diffusion processes (e.g., chemical pollutants) that are harmful to aquatic environments. In this paper, we propose an accuracy-aware diffusion process profiling approach using smart aquatic mobile sensors such as robotic fish. In our approach, the robotic sensors collaboratively profile the characteristics of a diffusion process including source location, discharged substance amount, and its evolution over time. In particular, the robotic sensors reposition themselves to progressively improve the profiling accuracy. We formulate a novel movement scheduling problem that aims to maximize the profiling accuracy subject to the limited sensor mobility and energy budget. We develop an efficient greedy algorithm and a more complex near-optimal radial algorithm to solve the problem. We conduct extensive simulations based on real data traces of GPS localization errors, robotic fish movement, and wireless communication. The results show that our approach can accurately profile dynamic diffusion processes under tight energy budgets. Moreover, a preliminary evaluation based on the implementation on TelosB motes validates the feasibility of deploying our profiling algorithms on mote-class robotic sensor platforms.