Optimal transmission range for multi-hop communication in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) consist of fixed sensor nodes and mobile actor nodes. Data is generated at the sensor nodes, and collected at the more powerful actor nodes. We consider the problem of finding the location for K actor nodes such that every sensor node is within d-hop from an actor node, where K and d are parameters of the problem. Our approach distinguishes itself in obtaining the minimum transmission radius necessary for such coverage to be possible. We provide an exact solution by via an integer-linear- programming formulation (ILP), and evaluate two heuristic approaches.