Energy balancing for robotic aided clustered wireless sensor networks using mobility diversity algorithms

TL;DR

This paper proposes a mobility diversity algorithm executed by a mobile robot to balance energy consumption in clustered wireless sensor networks, significantly extending network lifetime by mitigating small-scale fading effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multiple-link mobility diversity algorithm for a mobile robot to enhance energy efficiency in WSNs with fading channels.

Findings

Significant reduction in transmission power

Extended network operational lifetime

Effective mitigation of small-scale fading effects

Abstract

We consider the problem of energy balancing in a clustered wireless sensor network (WSN) deployed randomly in a large field and aided by a mobile robot (MR). The sensor nodes (SNs) are tasked to monitor a region of interest (ROI) and report their test statistics to the cluster heads (CHs), which subsequently report to the fusion center (FC) over a wireless fading channel. To maximize the lifetime of the WSN, the MR is deployed to act as an adaptive relay between a subset of the CHs and the FC. To achieve this we develop a multiple-link mobility diversity algorithm (MDA) executed by the MR that will allow to compensate simultaneously for the small-scale fading at the established wireless links (i.e., the MR-to-FC as well as various CH-to-MR communication links). Simulation results show that the proposed MR aided technique is able to significantly reduce the transmission power required and thus extend the operational lifetime of the WSN. We also show how the effect of small-scale fading at various wireless links is mitigated by using the proposed multiple-link MDA executed by a MR equipped with a single antenna.