Fang-Jing Wu

Mobility management algorithms and applications for mobile sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer a convenient way to monitor physical environments. In the past, WSNs are all considered static to continuously collect information from the environment. Today, by introducing intentional mobility to WSNs, we can further improve the network capability on many aspects, such as automatic node deployment, flexible topology adjustment, and rapid event reaction. In this paper, we survey recent progress in mobile WSNs and compare works in this field in terms of their models and mobility management methodologies. The discussion includes three aspects. Firstly, we discuss mobility management of mobile sensors for the purposes of forming a better WSN, enhancing network coverage and connectivity, and relocating some sensors. Secondly, we introduce path-planning methods for data ferries to relay data between isolated sensors and to extend a WSNs lifetime. Finally, we review some existing platforms and discuss several interesting applications of mobile WSNs. Copyright

Distributed wake-up scheduling for data collection in tree-based wireless sensor networks

In a multi-hop wireless network, a conventional way of defining interference neighbors is to prohibit a node from using the same slot/code as those of its 1-hop and 2-hop neighbors. However, for data collection in a wireless sensor network, since the set of communication nodes is limited and the transmission directions are toward the sink, we show that a less strict set of interference neighbors can be defined. Based on this observation, we develop an efficient distributed wake-up scheduling scheme for data collection in a sensor network that achieves both energy conservation and low reporting latency.

A probabilistic signal-strength-based evaluation methodology for sensor network deployment

The deployment of sensor networks have attracted a lot of attention recently. In essence this issue is concerned with how well a sensing field is monitored by sensors to achieve a particular coverage. In this paper, we propose a signal-strength-based approach to evaluate how well a sensing field is covered/monitored. We first formulate object tracking by a single sensor as a Gaussian-error model. Then we establish an error model on location estimation given that the location of an object is known. This leads to a model to evaluate a sensor network with given locations of sensors. We then apply the result to several applications, such as adding more sensor nodes for error reduction and scheduling power modes (awake or sleep) of sensors, and demonstrate our simulation results.

Data Gathering by Mobile Mules in a Spatially Separated Wireless Sensor Network

While wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are typically targeted at large-scale deployment, due to many practical or inevitable reasons, a WSN may not always remain connected. In this paper, we consider the possibility that a WSN may be spatially separated into multiple subnetworks. Data gathering, which is a fundamental mission of WSN, thus may rely on a mobile mule (“mule” for short) to conduct data gathering by visiting each subnetwork. This leads to the problem of minimizing the path length traversed by the mobile mule. We show that minimizing the path length, which may reflect the data gathering latency and the energy consumption of the mule is a generalization of the traveling salesman problem and is NP-complete. Some heuristics based on geometrical properties of node deployment are proposed. Our simulation results show that these heuristics perform very close to optimal solutions in most practical cases.

A Wireless Human Motion Capturing System for Home Rehabilitation

Following the trend of miniature intelligent sensing, wearing small, integrated wireless sensor nodes, such as one with accelerometers and compasses, to capture human body motions may have many applications in medical care and computer animation. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of intelligent sensors to capture human motions for home rehabilitation. We design a game to help a patient to conduct his/her rehabilitation program. For each exercise, the patient is instructed to wear sensors on specified movable body parts. The system will then estimate the quality of the movements and give scores as if it is advised by a therapist. In this way, patients will no longer feel painful and boring as that in traditional rehabilitation, which is typically done in hospitals.

Cyber-physical handshake

While sensor-enabled devices have greatly enriched human interactions in our daily life, discovering the essential knowledge behind sensing data is a critical issue to connect the cyber world and the physical world. This motivates us to design an innovative sensor-aided social network system, termed cyber-physical handshake. It allows two users to naturally exchange personal information with each other after detecting and authenticating the handshaking patterns between them. This work describes our design of detection and authentication mechanisms to achieve this purpose and our prototype system to facilitate handshake social behavior.

Energy-conserving data gathering by mobile mules in a spatially separated wireless sensor network

This paper considers a spatially separated wireless sensor network (SS-WSN), which consists of a number of isolated subnetworks that could be far away from each other in distance. We address the issue of using mobile mules to collect data from these sensor nodes. In such an environment, both data collection latency and network lifetime are critical issues. We model this problem as a bi-objective problem, called energy-constrained mule traveling salesman problem (EM-TSP), which aims at minimizing the traversal paths of mobile mules such that at least one node in each subnetwork is visited by a mule and the maximum energy consumption among all sensor nodes does not exceed a pre-defined threshold. Interestingly, the traversal problem turns out to be a generalization of the classical traveling salesman problem (TSP), an NP-complete problem. Based on some geometrical properties of the network, we propose some efficient heuristics for EM-TSP. We then extend our heuristics to multiple mobile mules. Extensive simulation results have been conducted, which show that our proposed solutions usually give much better solutions than most TSP-like approximations. Copyright c ⃝ 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using Mobile Mules for Collecting Data from an Isolated Wireless Sensor Network

This paper considers storage management in an isolated WSN, under the constraint that the storage space per node is limited. We formulate the memory spaces of these sensor nodes as a distributed storage system. Assuming that there is a sink in the WSN that will be visited by mobile mules intentionally (e.g., pre-arranged buses) or occasionally (e.g., non-pre-arranged taxis), we address three issues: (1) how to buffer sensory data to reduce data loss due to shortage of storage spaces, (2) if dropping of data is inevitable, how to avoid higher priority data from being dropped, and (3) how to keep higher priority data closer to the sink, such that the mobile mules can download more important data first when the downloading time is limited. We propose a Distributed Storage Management Strategy (DSMS) based on a novel shuffling mechanism similar to heap sort. It allows nodes to exchange sensory data with neighbors based on only local information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work addressing distributed and prioritized storing strategies for isolated WSNs.

Non-location-based Mobile Sensor Relocation in a Hybrid Static-Mobile Wireless Sensor Network

An inherent concern for a wireless sensor network (WSN) is the unbalanced energy consumption problem, where sensors closer to the sink are more likely to exhaust their energy faster than other nodes. To mitigate this problem, this paper considers including some resource-rich mobile nodes, called mobile data-pumps, to conduct data relaying from static sensors to the sink. The network thus becomes a two-tier network, with the original static sensors at the low tier and data-pumps at both low and high tiers. We propose a novel distributed navigation protocol that does not rely on any location information of sensor nodes to relocate data-pumps to meet both goals of connectivity and load balance. The main idea is a concept called virtual Voronoi cells, which can help data-pumps to locally balance their loads using the underlaying low-tier topology and thus significantly balance energy consumption of sensors. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of our result.

Traffic-attracted mobile relay deployment in a wireless ad hoc network

This paper considers an ad hoc network, where a set of energy-rich mobile nodes, termed mobile relays, are used to facilitate relaying packets so as to mitigate the energy consumption of static nodes. Existing work has focused on link-level relaying behaviors. In this work, we show how to achieve route-level relaying by overhearing route control and data packets. This allows mobile relays to redirect the traffic of static nodes and thus reduce their energy consumption. As the relocation of mobile relays needs to dynamically adjust the current traffic condition, a dynamic relocation scheme of mobile relays needs to be designed. In this paper, we refer to the mobile relay deployment (MRD) problem and design a distributed protocol for mobile relays. In our protocol, mobile relays do not necessarily participate in the routing discovery process, so static nodes can quickly switch back to their original routing paths without reconstruction efforts once mobile relays leave their communication ranges. Simulations by QualNet are presented to evaluate the performance of our protocol as compared to link-level relaying.