Foundations of Antcycle: Self-synchronized Duty-cycling in Mobile Sensor Networks

Ants are generally believed to follow an intensive work routine. Numerous tales and fables refer to ants as conscientious workers. Nevertheless, biologists have discovered that ants also rest for extended periods of time. This does not only hold for individual ants. Interestingly, ant colonies exhibit synchronized activity phases that result from self-organization. In this work, self-synchronization in ant colonies is taken as the inspiring source for a new mechanism of self-synchronized duty-cycling in mobile sensor networks. Hereby, we assume that sensor nodes are equipped with energy harvesting capabilities such as, for example, solar cells. We show that the proposed self-synchronization mechanism can be made adaptive depending on variable energy resources. The main objective of this paper is to study and explore the swarm intelligence foundations of self-synchronized duty-cycling. With this purpose in mind, physical constraints such as packet collisions and packet loss are generally not considered.