Effective location management of mobile actors in wireless sensor and actor networks

Recent years have witnessed an increasing availability of heterogeneous sensor networks that consist of a large number of resource constrained nodes (sensors) and a small number of powerful resource rich nodes (actors). Such heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Actor Network (WSANs) offer improvement of sensor networks' capacity/coverage, energy conservation and network lifetime. This paper investigates the case where sensors are organized into clusters and mobile actors are used for maintaining an energy efficient topology by periodically manipulating their geographical position. We present an elegant technique that allows actor nodes to find an optimal geographical location with respect to their associated cluster heads such that the overall energy consumed is minimized. The proposed technique includes a weighted cost function based on the residual energy levels of cluster heads that allows the mobile actor to optimally fine-tune its geographical location. We present simulation results that demonstrate a significant increase of network lifetime over the traditional cluster based WSN deployments.