Mobility-Based Generic Infrastructure for Large Scale Sensor Network Architecture

Building efficient general purpose sensor network infrastructure that could be leveraged by upper layer protocols is still an open research problem. In this paper, mobility is exploited to organize sensor nodes into generic efficient infrastructure. We propose layered infrastructure protocol (LIP) that allows mobile robots to organize the network nodes into co centric circular layers. Once the network is organized, the mobile robots are assigned layers to serve called home service layers where they act as moving probes to access the data and monitor the layers. Access positions are selected dynamically at each layer to provide anchors for the probes to visit in their home service layers. Probes cooperate to perform the application requests by executing a communication plan that is provided by the upper layer applications. The protocol is greatly able to cope with failures and requires only local updates for maintenance. We show that the proposed protocol provides a flexible infrastructure that keeps the nodes proximity and could be leveraged by upper layer protocols. To evaluate the performance of the proposed infrastructure some upper layer applications are implemented and built over the proposed infrastructure. Simulation-based results show the robustness and efficiency of the implemented applications.