Minimum hop and/or minimum distance robot movement with connectivity constraints in WSRNs

Abstract

Mobility within Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has proven to be quite useful in prolonging the lifetime of these networks. This mobility requires intelligent control of the robots in order to efficiently complete tasks within the network. If the tasks required of the network need to send audio-video data back to the base station, then we need to maintain some connectivity with the base station in order to efficiently use the energy within the network. After mathematically formulating our problem, we propose three algorithms to solve these problems and run extensive simulations to test these algorithms. We were able to optimally solve the minimum hop problem and compare that to the heuristics for the minimum distance problems.