Preferential field coverage through detour-based mobility coordination

Abstract

Abstract-Controlling the mobility pattern of mobile nodes (e.g., robots) to monitor a given field is a well-studied problem in sensor networks. In this setup, absolute control over the nodes' mobility is assumed. Apart from the physical ones, no other constraints are imposed on planning mobility of these nodes. In this paper, we address a more general version of the problem. Specifically, we consider a setting in which mobility of each node is externally constrained by a schedule consisting of a list of locations that the node must visit at particular times. Typically, such schedules exhibit some level of slack, which could be leveraged to achieve a specific coverage distribution of a field. Such a distribution defines the relative importance of different field locations. We define the Constrained Mobility Coordination problem for Preferential Coverage (CMC-PC) as follows: given a field with a desired monitoring distribution, and a number of nodes n, each with its own schedule, we need to coordinate the mobility of the nodes in order to achieve the following two goals: 1) satisfy the schedules of all nodes, and 2) attain the required coverage of the given field. We show that the CMC-PC problem is NP-complete (by reduction to the Hamiltonian Cycle problem). Then we propose TFM, a distributed heuristic to achieve field coverage that is as close as possible to the required coverage distribution. We verify the premise of TFM using extensive simulations, as well as taxi logs from a major metropolitan area. We compare TFM to the random mobility strategy -the latter provides a lower bound on performance. Our results show that TFM is very successful in matching the required field coverage distribution, and that it provides, at least, two-fold query success ratio for queries that follow the target coverage distribution of the field.

Rational coordination of crowdsourced resources for geo-temporal request satisfaction

“…This notion of mobility coordination has first been proposed in [17], according to our knowledge, in which the authors assume that mobile nodes have a flexibility in their schedule, and they leverage this flexibility to obtain a certain coverage distribution of the network.…”

Data De-Duplication Aware Clustering for Optimized Storage in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

“…In this work, a dynamic-programming algorithm is used to determine an optimal execution order of queries. Examples of other studies that proposed coordination strategies include techniques that ensure efficient storage, caching, and exchange of spatio-temporal data [6,7] or aggregates thereof [8]. In our work, we focus on reducing overheads by adding Data De-duplication functionality to a subset of nodes at various hierarchies, without concern to resource or energy constraints.…”

The filter-placement problem and its application to minimizing information multiplicity

“…In that work, a dynamic-programming algorithm is used to determine an optimal execution order of queries. Examples of other studies that proposed coordination strategies include techniques that ensure efficient storage, caching, and exchange of spatio-temporal data [22,23] or aggregates thereof [21].…”