Energy Consumption Estimation in Hybrid Sensor Networks Running Assisted Navigation Algorithms

Hybrid sensor networks (HSNs), made up of many static sensors interacting with a limited number of mobile robotic sensors, can support a variety of applications in which assisted navigation, implemented for mobile robotic sensors, performs requested operations in hostile environments, where the human presence is impracticable. On the other hand, the limited on-board battery energy of the sensor nodes imposes hard constraints to the wireless communication and computing capabilities of such nodes, thus limiting the capacity of a HSN to run an application for a period of interest without human intervention. These considerations have motivated this paper, which describes a method to estimate the energy consumption under changeable working conditions in a HSN running an assisted navigation algorithm based on the "credit field" concept.