Power Control and Network Design in Mobile Sensor Networks

We consider the problem of designing a wireless mobile sensor network to collect information from demands whose time of arrival and locations are stochastic. We study a simple scheme that partitions the target area into subregions monitored by a mobile node, which then communicates the data collected from its region via multihop wireless communication to a single base station. We find the unique joint power control and area partitioning strategy that maximizes the lifetime of the wireless mobile sensor network. We explicitly characterize this strategy and propose an efficient algorithm to find it. Finally, we study the sensitivity of the optimal strategy on the parameters of the problem via simulations.