Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Resilient Wireless Sensor Networks Using Topology Control: A Review

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) may be deployed in failure-prone environments, and WSNs nodes easily fail due to unreliable wireless connections, malicious attacks and resource-constrained features. Nevertheless, if WSNs can tolerate at most losing k − 1 nodes while the rest of nodes remain connected, the network is called k − connected. k is one of the most important indicators for WSNs’ self-healing capability. Following a WSN design flow, this paper surveys resilience issues from the topology control and multi-path routing point of view. This paper provides a discussion on transmission and failure models, which have an important impact on research results. Afterwards, this paper reviews theoretical results and representative topology control approaches to guarantee WSNs to be k − connected at three different network deployment stages: pre-deployment, post-deployment and re-deployment. Multi-path routing protocols are discussed, and many NP-complete or NP-hard problems regarding topology control are identified. The challenging open issues are discussed at the end. This paper can serve as a guideline to design resilient WSNs

Connectivity Analysis in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network based on VDTN

In the last decade, user demand has been increasing exponentially based on modern communication systems. One of these new technologies is known as mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET). One part of MANET is called a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). It has different types such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicular delay-tolerant networks, and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I). To provide sufficient quality of communication service in the Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Network (VDTN), it is important to present a comprehensive survey that shows the challenges and limitations of VANET. In this paper, we focus on one type of VANET, which is known as VDTNs. To investigate realistic communication systems based on VANET, we considered intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) and the possibility of replacing the roadside unit with VDTN. Many factors can affect the message propagation delay. When road-side units (RSUs) are present, which leads to an increase in the message delivery efficiency since RSUs can collaborate with vehicles on the road to increase the throughput of the network, we propose new methods based on environment and vehicle traffic and present a comprehensive evaluation of the newly suggested VDTN routing method. Furthermore, challenges and prospects are presented to stimulate interest in the scientific community