Robot Workload Distribution in Active Sensor Networks

This paper discusses the workload distribution problem in an Active Sensor Network, which integrates multiple sensor network-friendly mobile robots into a traditional sensor network and introduces adaptivity, self-healing, responsiveness and longer lifetime to the network. In order to distribute the workload among the service robots, first, a Service Set Partition (SSP) algorithm is developed to disperse the robots so that each robot can attend one subset of the sensors. Second, to service multiple sensors simultaneously, a Contract Network Protocol (CNP) is adopted to assign tasks to multiple service robots. Through CNP, certain performances such as energy efficiency and service time can be optimized. The proposed algorithms are verified through simulations.