Placement of Smart Mobile Access Points in Wireless Sensor Networks and Cyber-Physical Systems Using Fog Computing

Increasingly sophisticated, complex, energy-efficient cyber-physical systems, wireless sensor networks are emerging, facilitated by recent advances in computing, sensor technologies. Integration of cyber-physical systems, wireless sensor networks with other contemporary technologies, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, fog or edge computing, enable creation of completely new smart solutions. We present the concept of a Smart Mobile Access Point (SMAP), which is a key building block for a smart network, propose an efficient placement approach for such SMAPs. SMAPs predict the behavior of the network, based on information collected from the network, select the best approach to support the network at any given time. When needed, they autonomously change their positions to obtain a better configuration from the network performance perspective. Therefore, placement of SMAPs is an important issue in such a system. Initial placement of SMAPs is an NP problem, evolutionary algorithms provide an efficient means to solve it. Specifically, we present a parallel implementation of the imperialistic competitive algorithm, an efficient evaluation or fitness function to solve the initial placement of SMAPs in the fog computing context.