Redes de sensores com nodos móveis: investigando efeitos da mobilidade na cobertura de sensoriamento e no balanceamento de carga

Abstract

The nodes mobility in wireless sensor networks has been employed to solve communication problems through mobile data mulling or base stations, or yet to improve coverage using mobile sensor nodes, which move to sensing uncovered areas. However, one of the main challenges in wireless sensor networks is the energy consumption, since the network lifetime depends on the node battery charge. In order to increase the lifetime of the event-oriented networks, dynamic load balancing strategies exploit redundancy in the nodes sensing areas and avoid that more than one node process the same event. Mobility as well as the load balancing are important dynamic adaptations that can be employed to improve the ef?ciency of sensor networks, but the integrated use of these two adaptations needs to be investigated. This work evaluates the effects of the sensor nodes mobility both on network coverage and on the ef?ciency of load balancing techniques used in event-oriented sensor networks. In the context of this work, an strategy has implemented, which moves nodes based on the action of repulsion forces, aiming to spread nodes over the area of interest and improve network coverage. Its impact on coverage has assessed in different deployment scenarios and networks with different densities. First, when nodes are deployed at random, then mobility allows them to redistribute and maximize the network coverage. In a second moment, the strategy is applied when nodes begin to be deactivated by the discharge of their batteries, where the mobility can minimize the effect of the deactivation of a node of the network. In addition, experiments have carried out in order to observe the impact of the use of this mobility strategy on the ef?ciency of two load balancing techniques considered state-of-the-art in event-oriented wireless sensor networks. In this work we considered the energy consumption that the node spends with the sensing, but the energy consumption spent with the movement is out of scope.