A Novel Approach to Reconnaissance using Cooperative Mobile Sensor Nodes

This paper proposes search algorithms utilizing multiple mobile sensor nodes (MSN). Our goal is to minimize the total search time in a given search area while enabling cooperation among the MSNs and tolerating possible failures of one or more MSNs. We first describe a Lane Based Search (LBS) strategy in which each mobile sensor node is in charge of a subarea called a lane. We then propose and analyze two distributed synchronization schemes, namely Alternating Column Synchronization (ACS) and Strict Line Synchronization (SLS), which are essential for co-operation and fault tolerance to MSN failures. Simulations were performed to evaluate their performances in terms of the total search time. We show through simulation results and numerical analysis that strict line synchronization with appropriate parameters outperforms alternating column synchronization.