Performance analysis of hybrid mobile sensor networks

Abstract

In this thesis, we focus on performance analysis of hybrid mobile sensor networks, where a small number of mobile sensors work with a large number of static sensors to achieve network performance requirements. Three performance metrics, network lifetime, network coverage and localization beacon density, are studied in this thesis. Firstly, we show that the network lifetime can be improved by 4 times with a single mobile relay in an ideal dense network. In randomly deployed networks, an LP-based mobility schedule provides two times network lifetime than static networks. Secondly, we show that the sensor network can be fully covered with the help of mobile sensors which only move once for a short distance. A distributed movement scheduling algorithm is proposed to coordinate the movements of mobiles. Finally, we introduce a new coverage model, called sector coverage, for estimating the beacon density for mobile localization over the network field.