Simple movement control algorithm for bi-connectivity in robotic sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Hai Liu;Xiaowen Chu;Yiu-Wing Leung;Rui Du

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Special issue on simple wireless sensor networking solutions
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Robotic sensor networks are more powerful than sensor networks because the sensors can be moved by the robots to adjust their sensing coverage. In robotic sensor networks, an important problem is movement control: how the robots can autonomously move to the desired locations for sensing and data collection. In this paper, we study a new movement control problem with the following essential requirements: i) an initial and possibly disconnected network is self-organized into a bi-connected network, ii) only I-hop information is used for movement control, iii) the coverage of the network is maximized while the total moving distance in the movement process is minimized. We propose a simple movement control algorithm for this problem. This algorithm emulates the attractive force (such as the force in a stretched spring) and the repulsive force (such as the electrostatic force between electric charges) in nature, such that each robot simply follows the resultant virtual force to move. We theoretically prove that this algorithm guarantees bi-connected networks under a mild condition and derive bounds on the maximum coverage and the minimum moving distance. We conduct extensive simulation experiments to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is effective.