Range-Free Mobile Actor Relocation in a Two-Tiered Wireless Sensor and Actor Network

Abstract

Two-tiered wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) have been proposed to enhance network capabilities, where a set of resource-rich mobile nodes (termed actors) form a connected backbone to relay sensing data from static sensors to the sink and sometimes are requested by sensors to perform a particular action. Such a two-tiered WSAN facilitates scalability and can efficiently reduce the energy consumption incurred by conventional hop-by-hop relaying via only sensors. However, relocating actors to achieve both connectivity and load balance is a challenge, especially when there is no location information of the nodes. Connectivity ensures that the actors are connected, whereas load balance ensures that actors collect and originate a similar amount of sensory data from the sensors. In this article, we formulate the Connected and Balanced Mobile Actor Relocation (CBMAR) optimization problem to address both connectivity and load balance and prove that the problem is NP-hard. We thus propose a dual-mode distributed actor relocation protocol that does not rely on any location information of nodes to relocate actors. The idea is to locally form virtual Voronoi cells of actors (termed covering cells) based on the lower-tiered topology, where each actor locally recruits its own sensor members to form its own covering cell. By maintaining the covering cell, each actor locally relocates itself toward a sensor along the lower-tiered topology. Extensive simulation results show that the protocol can achieve both objectives of connectivity and load balance with low moving and communication overheads.