Energy Balanced Dispatch of Mobile Edge Nodes for Confident Information Coverage Hole Repairing in IoT

Abstract

The promising Internet of Things (IoT) provides a powerful platform for practical smart applications. The limited resources of the IoT nodes as well as the emerged coverage holes pose a great challenge on the quality of service of the IoT. Mobile edge computing (MEC), which can improve the IoT nodes energy consumption efficiency and optimize the utilization effectiveness of the limited resources, provides a novel view for coping with the challenge. Based on the MEC, this paper focuses on how to solve the problem of dispatch of mobile edge nodes for confident information coverage holes repairing (DMEN-CICHR) with the goal of maximizing the network lifetime and guaranteeing the network connectivity. To deal with the DMEN-CICHR problem, we develop an energy-balanced and obstacle-adaptive mobile edge node dispatch algorithm called EBOADMEN-CICHR, which restricts the mobile edge nodes from moving too long distance by setting a bound for each CIC hole and repeatedly updating the bound by a competition mechanism. To guarantee the network connectivity, the EBOADMEN-CICHR recursively performs breadth first search on a constructed undirected graph to find all disconnected subgraphs and then dispatches some mobile edge nodes to connect those disconnected subgraphs until the whole network is connected. A number of experiments emulating the realistic scenarios in radiological pollution monitoring in uranium tailings are executed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed EBOADMEN-CICHR solution. Experimental results show the EBOADMEN-CICHR can perform better than other peer methods in term of higher energy efficiency and longer network lifetime.