Energy cost of coordination algorithms for wireless mobile sensor networks

Wireless mobile sensor networks are becoming increasingly popular. They mostly consist of low-cost mobile platforms equipped with sensors and an on-board battery. Energy consumption is therefore typically one of the main factors that needs to be addressed during the deployment. Communication accounts for much of the energy expenditures in a sensor network. The goal of this paper is to establish lower bounds on energy cost due to communication for several robot coordination schemes. In particular, we study how the energy cost changes with the number of mobile nodes in the wireless network, and we compare a peer-to-peer communication model with a multicast system.