Energy-Efficient Scheduling for Mobile Sensors Using Connection Graphs in a Hybrid Wireless Sensor Network with Obstacles

This paper considers the scheduling problem of mobile sensors in a hybrid wireless sensor network (WSN) with obstacles. In a WSN, static sensors monitor the environment and report where events appear in the sensing field. Then, mobile sensors are dispatched to these event locations to perform in-depth analysis. The sensing field may contain obstacles of any shape and size. A big challenge is how to efficiently dispatch the mobile sensor to find an obstacle-avoiding shortest path. To remedy this issue, we propose an efficient scheduling mechanism based on connection graphs in this paper. Specifically, the region of network is divided into grid cells with the same size. Consequently, the search space of the shortest path is restricted to the connection graphs composed of some grid cells. Through simulation, we verify the effectiveness of our method. The paper contributes to developing an energy-efficient dispatch solution in the presence of obstacles.