fAPEbook - Animal Social Life Monitoring with Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wild life monitoring requires a sophisticated process of planning, installation, execution, data collection, and data interpretation. The effort and time spent increases tremendously with the area and the number of observed objects as well as with the time frame of the observations. However, the application of wireless sensor nodes enables a scalable sampling method and fine granularity of data difficult to obtain otherwise. By including resource rich actor nodes, the data collection and evaluation are further optimized. In this paper, a wireless sensor and actor network (WSAN) protocol is designed for capturing and monitoring the social interactions of the complex social network of gorillas. The nodes are intended to be attached on the apes forming a mobile network. The local interaction patterns among the nodes are analyzed throughout the network life time. The protocol then determines the social roles of the gorillas based on previous research findings about their social structure, and builds a profile for each ape, which demonstrates the status, kinship and role played within the society. As a result, the proposed protocol generates a social directory of the ape troop under observation, namely fAPEbook. The contribution of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm by its ability to capture the different characteristics in the society with the established mobility models. The results suggest the applicability of the algorithm in field tests with wild life.