Energy Efficient Mobile Routing in Actuator and Sensor Networks with Connectivity Preservation

Abstract

In mobile wireless sensor networks, flows sent from data collecting sensors to a sink could traverse inefficient resource expensive paths. Such paths may have several negative effects such as devices battery depletion that may cause the network to be disconnected and packets to experience arbitrary delays. This is particularly problematic in eventbased sensor networks (deployed in disaster recovery missions) where flows are of great importance. In this paper, we use node mobility to improve energy consumption of computed paths. Mobility is a two-sword edge, however. Moving a node may render the network disconnected and useless. We propose CoMNet (Connectivity preservation Mobile routing protocol for actuator and sensor NETworks), a localized mechanism that modifies the network topology to support resource efficient transmissions. To the best of our knowledge, CoMNet is the first georouting algorithm which considers controlled mobility to improve routing energy consumption while ensuring network connectivity. CoMNet is based on (i) a cost to progress metric which optimizes both sending and moving costs, (ii) the use of a connected dominating set to maintain network connectivity. CoMNet is general enough to be applied to various networks (actuator, sensor). Our simulations show that CoMNet guarantees network connectivity and is effective in achieving high delivery rates and substantial energy savings compared to traditional approaches.