Monitoring a Herd of Pastured Cattle Using Mobile Sensor Networks

In this paper, we tackle a monitoring problem for a head of pastured cattle by employing sensors that self-organize their networks while adapting to topological changes. Our challenge is exploiting locally communicative interactions of a relative received signal strength under minimal conditions, such as locality, state memory, and implicit coordination. The solution approach focuses on achieving some network redundancy by selecting specific neighboring sensors with high connectivity, resulting in the determination of favorite relations in a cattle herd. The solution is verified by performing extensive simulations featuring self-organization, topological adaptation, and self-healing. Moreover, the effectiveness of the self-organization is demonstrated in a Miyazaki ranch by using five cows attached to sensor tags. Our approach is effective for the secure adaptive self-organization of mobile sensor networks in real-world sensor network applications.