Intentional Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks

The emerging wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer a convenient way to monitor physical environments. In the past, WSNs are deployed with static nodes to continuously collect information from the environment. Today, by introducing the concept of controllable mobility to WSNs, we can further improve the network capability on many aspects, for example, automatic WSN deployment, flexible topology adjustment, and rapid reaction to events. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent researches on intentional mobility of WSNs. The discussion contains four parts. First, we survey some papers related to mobility-assisted network deployment. Second, we introduce functional enhancement schemes by mobile sensors. Third, we discuss the dispatch issue of mobile sensors in a hybrid WSN. Finally, we present the design of mobile platforms to support mobility for sensors and give several applications of mobile WSNs.