Using mobile robotic agents to increase service availability and extend network lifetime on WSRNs

Wireless Sensor and Robot Networks (WSRNs) are heterogeneous collections of sensor nodes and robotic vehicles that communicate wirelessly. In the last decade many research studies have attempted to address the challenging trade-offs of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that arise due to their resource limitations, however, much work is still to be done. A recent trend is to merge different subclasses of cyber-physical systems together to achieve the desired performance goals by benefiting from their heterogeneity. This paper presents a bio-inspired robot guidance technique that is used to improve network coverage, increase service availability and minimise energy consumption of WSNs using robotic agents on vehicles. We explore the performance consequences of the Pheromone Signalling-based Load Balancing (PS) Robot Guidance on an abstract level simulator which provides a system perspective. The effectiveness of the algorithm is evaluated with different network topologies and investigated on various scenarios. Simulated experimental results on mesh and sparse topologies validate that robot guidance based on PS increases network lifetime.