It is Not Just a Matter of Time: Oscillation-Free Emergency Navigation with Sensor Networks

Abstract

Emergency navigation is an emerging application of wireless sensor networks with significant research and social values. In order to ensure the safety and timeliness of navigation for the users, most of the existing works model navigation as a path-planning problem and adopt different metrics, such as the shortest route, the minimum exposure path, and the maximum safe distance. Without sufficient consideration of the dynamics of danger, the existing approaches are likely to cause users to move back and forth during navigation, known as oscillation. Frequent oscillations inevitably result in the user remaining in danger for a longer period of time, amplification the user's panic, and eventual decrease in the chances of survival. In this paper we take users' oscillations in the dynamic environments into account and quantify the local success rate of navigation using a metric called ENO (Expected Number of Oscillations). We then propose OPEN, an oscillation-free navigation approach that minimizes the probability of oscillation and guarantees the success rate of emergency navigation. We implement OPEN and evaluate its performance through test-bed experiments and extensive simulations. The results demonstrate that OPEN outperforms the current state-of-the-arts approaches with respect to user safety and navigation efficiency.