Graph-Based Mechanism for Scheduling Mobile Sensors in Time-Sensitive WSNs Applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely adopted in many domains like military and environment monitoring.In general, sensors in WSNs aim to sense and collect various types of information from environments. Sensors usually can be divided into two types as static or mobile sensors, where mobile sensors can move to collect the information from static sensors. How to make the best use of sensor's energy and prolong network lifetime is a challenge, which has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. In this paper, we schedule mobile sensors by applying techniques derived from ant colony optimization and genetic algorithm in order to balance the energy consumption of mobile sensors. The network where static sensors are deployed are divided into relatively small regions, then we use our technique to allocate these regions to each mobile sensor, while ensuring that energy consumption of each mobile sensor is close to each other. Experimental evaluation shows that our technique can effectively balance the load of each mobile sensor and thus prolong the networks lifetime.