Analysis of network connectivity: Wildlife and Sensor Network

Abstract

Connectivity Maintenance for mobile nodes is an important issue in Ad-hoc Wireless Sensor Network application like Wildlife Monitoring wherein data needs to be constantly captured and analysed to track and study animals. The random nature of the animal movement makes the task of tracking quite challenging. The work presented here attempts at addressing and analysing the issue of node connectivity as the network situation changes from dense to sparse and vice versa. Here we are looking at establishing Hand-Off to provide connectivity via next hop nodes and analyse its effect on the duration of connectivity. This is done by determining the transmitting radius of the nodes for maximum coverage, based on the maximum velocity of the animal carrying the node. To over-come the problem of network holes formed due to dynamically varying node densities in the network, we establish an adaptive and energy efficient sampling scheme. Preliminary modelling results reflects that the duration of connectivity hyperbolically reduces with reduction in the overlap of mobile and receiving node, and that the mobile node is able to quickly adapt itself by predicting the values for the next hop node with a small number of sample inputs.