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

Intelligent beaconless geographical forwarding for urban vehicular environments

A Vehicular Ad hoc Network is a type of wireless ad hoc network that facilitates ubiquitous connectivity between vehicles in the absence of fixed infrastructure. Source based geographical routing has been proven to perform well in unstable vehicular networks. However, these routing protocols leverage beacon messages to update the positional information of all direct neighbour nodes. As a result, high channel congestion or problems with outdated neighbour lists may occur. To this end, we propose a street-aware, Intelligent Beaconless (IB) geographical forwarding protocol based on modified 802.11 Request To Send (RTS)/ Clear To Send frames, for urban vehicular networks. That is, at the intersection, each candidate junction node leverage digital road maps as well as distance to destination, power signal strength of the RTS frame and direction routing metrics to determine if it should elect itself as a next relay node. For packet forwarding between Intersections, on the other hand, the candidate node considers the relative direction to the packet carrier node and power signal strength of the RTS frame as routing metrics to elect itself based on intelligently combined metrics. After designing the IB protocol, we implemented it and compared it with standard protocols. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can improve average delay and successful packet delivery ratio in realistic wireless channel conditions and urban vehicular scenarios