Mobile Enabled Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

The combined and separated research advancement in the fields of sensing, communication, and computing have driven the research efforts in wireless sensor networks (WSN) in recent years. According to the traditional definition of WSNs, a dense, static, and prohibitively expensive sensor deployment is implicitly required, which has limited the feasibility of WSNs in nonmilitary approaches. Aside from stationary sensor and sink deployment, the introduction of mobility of mobile terminals into WSNs can be leveraged to alleviate the burden of certain static sinks in order for efficient information repository, dissemination and sharing. In fact, the rapid development of diverse short distance wireless communication methods, such as Bluetooth and Zigbee, have not only popularized multi-radio functioned mobile devices, but also found their potential applications via WSN networking. To realize the goal of large scale wireless sensor network deployment, in this paper, we introduce an architecture of multi-radio enabled mobile wireless sensor network (MEMOSEN), which has taken the heterogeneity and mobility of sensors and sinks into account. The capacity gain and topology dynamics due to mobility in MEMOSEN have been addressed. The design challenges and potential applications of MEMOSEN have been analyzed as well