Trail-Based Search for Efficient Event Report to Mobile Actors in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Network Engineering
• Wireless Communication

Background:

• Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) face challenges in event reporting due to actor mobility and unknown locations.
• Existing search strategies often neglect node mobility, leading to high energy consumption and transmission delays.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an efficient search strategy for WSANs that leverages actor mobility.
• To reduce energy consumption and transmission delay in event reporting.

Main Methods:

• Developed the trail-based search (TS) strategy, where actors leave trails of footprints.
• Search packets are forwarded along discovered trails to reach the actor.
• Proposed a redundancy reduction scheme (TS-R) to minimize redundant transmissions.

Main Results:

• TS effectively utilizes actor mobility to improve search efficiency.
• The proposed TS strategy significantly reduces energy consumption and search delay compared to Expanding Ring Search (ERS).
• Theoretical analysis confirms the efficiency and trail connectivity guarantees of TS.

Conclusions:

• The trail-based search strategy offers a superior solution for event reporting in mobile WSANs.
• TS addresses the limitations of traditional search methods by incorporating actor mobility.
• The TS-R scheme further optimizes the strategy by reducing transmission redundancy.