A Communication Architecture for Mobile 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. In this paper, the coordination and communication problems in WSANs with mobile actors are studied. A hybrid location management scheme is introduced to handle the mobility of actors with minimal energy expenditure. Actors broadcast location updates limiting their scope based on Voronoi diagrams, whereas sensors predict the movement of actors based on Kalman filtering of previously received updates. An optimal energy-aware forwarding rule is then derived for sensor-actor communication, based on geographical routing. The proposed scheme allows controlling the delay of the data-delivery process based on power control, and deals with network congestion by forcing multiple actors to be recipients for traffic generated in the event area. The motion of actors is coordinated to optimally accomplish the tasks based on the characteristics of the events