Utilization of mobile agents for Voronoi-based heterogeneous wireless sensor network reconfiguration

Abstract

Partially connected heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (hWSNs) can be reconfigured via the utilization of mobile agents that aim in reconnecting the disconnected clusters of nodes. The inherent assumption is the knowledge of the spatial location of the nodes and the transmitting power of their uniform radiation pattern. A primitive power control scheme relying on the underlying Voronoi-diagram attempts to reconnect the disjoint clusters. If this not achievable with the existing functioning nodes, mobile robots are repositioned within the working area in order to reconnect the disjoint clusters. The placement of robots depends on the cardinality of each cluster of nodes and the minimum distance between the clusters. The centralized hWSN-reconfiguration scheme minimizes a cost function that penalizes the number of disjoint clusters, and the area that is not covered by the overall set of nodes. Simulation results are offered to investigate the efficiency of the suggested scheme.