Purposeful Deployment via Self-Organizing Flocking Coalition in Sensor Networks

This paper presents a deployment strategy via self organizing flocking coalitions for mobile sensor network coverage. The concepts of our approach are inspired by the flocking phenomenon which locally controls a group of mobile agents performed as follows: (i) global alignment of their velocity vectors, (ii) convergence of their velocities to a common one, and (iii) collision avoidance. Adding mobility of local control to sensor network significantly increase the capability of the sensor network by making it resilient to failures and responding to events. The controllable mobility in sensor network hence is used to help achieve the network’s missions. That is, mobility may be “purposeful” instead of being treated as an uncontrollable external stimulus to which the ad-hoc networks must respond. To make use of the purposeful deployment, we implemented and evaluated a fire tracking application to determine how well sensor network deployment achieves its goal. Fire is modeled by agents that gradually spread throughout the specific environment. We then introduce a simulating model for the movement of autonomous fire tracker agents that exhibits flocking behavior and forms a mobile sensor network collectively. Fire tracker agents are used to form a perimeter around the fire agents to extinguish fire agents. Finally, we demonstrate that a group of fire tracker agents executing the leaderless flocking models with emulated sensor network can successfully flock (even in the presence of individual fire tracker agents failure) and that systematic characterization of sensor network flocking parameters is achievable.