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

Node placement in Wireless Mesh Networks: a comparison study of WMN-SA and WMN-PSO simulation systems

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.With the fast development of wireless technologies, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are becoming an important networking infrastructure due to their low cost and increased high speed wireless Internet connectivity. In our previous work, we implemented a simulation system based on Simulated Annealing (SA) for solving node placement problem in wireless mesh networks, called WMN-SA. Also, we implemented a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based simulation system, called WMN-PSO. In this paper, we compare two systems considering calculation time. From the simulation results, when the area size is 32 × 32 and 64 × 64, WMN-SA is better than WMN-PSO. When the area size is 128 × 128, WMN-SA performs better than WMN-PSO. However, WMN-SA needs more calculation time than WMN-PSO.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Investigation of fitness function weight-coefficients for optimization in WMN-PSO simulation system

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.With the fast development of wireless technologies, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are becoming an important networking infrastructure due to their low cost and increased high speed wireless Internet connectivity. In our previous work, we implemented a simulation system based on Particle Swam Optimization for solving node placement problem in wireless mesh networks, called WMN-PSO. In this paper, we use Size of Giant Component (SGC) and Number of Covered Mesh Clients (NCMC) as metrics for optimization. Then, we analyze effects of weight-coefficients for SGC and NCMC. From the simulation results, we found that the best values of the weight-coefficients for SGC and NCMC are 0.7 and 0.3, respectively.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Implementation and evaluation of a simulation system based on particle swarm optimisation for node placement problem in wireless mesh networks

With the fast development of wireless technologies, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are becoming an important networking infrastructure due to their low cost and increased high speed wireless internet connectivity. This paper implements a simulation system based on particle swarm optimisation (PSO) in order to solve the problem of mesh router placement in WMNs. Four replacement methods of mesh routers are considered: constriction method (CM), random inertia weight method (RIWM), linearly decreasing Vmax method (LDVM) and linearly decreasing inertia weight method (LDIWM). Simulation results are provided, showing that the CM converges very fast, but has the worst performance among the methods. The considered performance metrics are the size of giant component (SGC) and the number of covered mesh clients (NCMC). The RIWM converges fast and the performance is good. The LDIWM is a combination of RIWM and LDVM. The LDVM converges after 170 number of phases but has a good performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Coverage Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: Review and Future Directions

The coverage problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be generally defined as a measure of how effectively a network field is monitored by its sensor nodes. This problem has attracted a lot of interest over the years and as a result, many coverage protocols were proposed. In this survey, we first propose a taxonomy for classifying coverage protocols in WSNs. Then, we classify the coverage protocols into three categories (i.e. coverage aware deployment protocols, sleep scheduling protocols for flat networks, and cluster-based sleep scheduling protocols) based on the network stage where the coverage is optimized. For each category, relevant protocols are thoroughly reviewed and classified based on the adopted coverage techniques. Finally, we discuss open issues (and recommend future directions to resolve them) associated with the design of realistic coverage protocols. Issues such as realistic sensing models, realistic energy consumption models, realistic connectivity models and sensor localization are covered