24,646 research outputs found
Coordination of Mobile Mules via Facility Location Strategies
In this paper, we study the problem of wireless sensor network (WSN)
maintenance using mobile entities called mules. The mules are deployed in the
area of the WSN in such a way that would minimize the time it takes them to
reach a failed sensor and fix it. The mules must constantly optimize their
collective deployment to account for occupied mules. The objective is to define
the optimal deployment and task allocation strategy for the mules, so that the
sensors' downtime and the mules' traveling distance are minimized. Our
solutions are inspired by research in the field of computational geometry and
the design of our algorithms is based on state of the art approximation
algorithms for the classical problem of facility location. Our empirical
results demonstrate how cooperation enhances the team's performance, and
indicate that a combination of k-Median based deployment with closest-available
task allocation provides the best results in terms of minimizing the sensors'
downtime but is inefficient in terms of the mules' travel distance. A
k-Centroid based deployment produces good results in both criteria.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, conferenc
A Lightweight Distributed Solution to Content Replication in Mobile Networks
Performance and reliability of content access in mobile networks is
conditioned by the number and location of content replicas deployed at the
network nodes. Facility location theory has been the traditional, centralized
approach to study content replication: computing the number and placement of
replicas in a network can be cast as an uncapacitated facility location
problem. The endeavour of this work is to design a distributed, lightweight
solution to the above joint optimization problem, while taking into account the
network dynamics. In particular, we devise a mechanism that lets nodes share
the burden of storing and providing content, so as to achieve load balancing,
and decide whether to replicate or drop the information so as to adapt to a
dynamic content demand and time-varying topology. We evaluate our mechanism
through simulation, by exploring a wide range of settings and studying
realistic content access mechanisms that go beyond the traditional
assumptionmatching demand points to their closest content replica. Results show
that our mechanism, which uses local measurements only, is: (i) extremely
precise in approximating an optimal solution to content placement and
replication; (ii) robust against network mobility; (iii) flexible in
accommodating various content access patterns, including variation in time and
space of the content demand.Comment: 12 page
- …