Dynamic Mesh-Based Location Service in WSANs by a Team of Robots

A team of robots (also called actors) in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) may not be able to optimally cover an area so that after an event is reported by a sensor all robots may not be quickly reachable for possible action in time. Furthermore, sensors may not be able to immediately deliver a report to a nearby robot. In this paper, we focus on dynamic location service to deal with sequence of multiple events in WSANs. We propose a novel dynamic mesh-based protocol (DMesh) to boost real-time performance of location service. We investigate new strategies for efficient event coverage, so that the robot team may appropriately partition, visit sensors periodically, and minimize reporting delay while preserving ability to respond possibly with increasing number of robots as event (such as a fire) progresses and more robots arrive near the scene.