Biologically inspired mobility models for energy conservation in sensor networks

This paper presents a mechanism for extending network life by introducing energy-aware mobility in wireless sensor networks. The concept of mobility for energy saving has been motivated by a natural grouping behavior that is observed in Emperor penguin communities in the Antarctic region. In this paper, we first draw a parallel between the heat loss of a penguin at the group periphery, and the routing energy burden of a sensor node near base stations. Then we develop a distributed mobility algorithm that works based on local energy information and makes sure that the energy load across sensor nodes in a network are evenly distributed for collective extension of the network life. We evaluate the protocol, and compare it with the performance upper bound derived from a centralized version of the algorithm. The results demonstrate that using the distributed algorithm for controlled node mobility it is possible to significantly extend the network life. It is also shown that this holds in situations where the energy cost of physical node mobility is modeled up to four orders of magnitude larger than the energy cost for packet communication.