Severe energy limitations, and a paucity of computation pose a set of difficult design challenges for sensor networks. Recent progress in two seemingly disparate research areas namely, distributed robotics and low power embedded systems has led to the creation of mobile (or robotic) sensor networks. Autonomous node mobility brings with it its own challenges, but also alleviates some of the traditional problems associated with static sensor networks. We illustrate this by presenting the design of the robomote, a robot platform that functions as a single mobile node in a mobile sensor network. We briefly describe two case studies where the robomote has been used for table top experiments with a mobile sensor network.
Ad hoc wireless networks are power constrained since nodes operate with limited battery energy. To maximize the lifetime of these networks (defined by the condition that a fixed percentage of the nodes in the network "die out" due to lack of energy), network-related transactions through each mobile node must be controlled such that the power dissipation rates of all nodes are nearly the same. Assuming that all nodes start with a finite amount of battery capacity and that the energy dissipation per bit of data and control packet transmission or reception is known, this paper presents a new source-initiated (on-demand) routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks that increases the network lifetime. Simulation results show that the proposed power-aware source routing protocol has a higher performance than other source initiated routing protocols in terms of the network lifetime.
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