A Self-Adaptive Approach for Mobile Wireless Sensors to Achieve Energy Efficient Information Transmission

Wireless sensor networks have played an important role in many applications, where sensors in the network can automatically collect and transmit information in an environment without much human maintenance. To enhance the adaptability of sensors, people produce mobile wireless sensors through fixing wireless sensors on mobile vehicles or robots. The same as static wireless sensors, since the energy of mobile wireless sensors is still supplied by the battery, their energy management has a great impact on their lifetime. Different with static wireless sensors, the mobility of mobile wireless sensors gives us a new perspective to achieve the efficient energy management. In this paper, a decentralized self-adaptive approach is proposed for mobile wireless sensors, which enables sensors in a mobile wireless sensor network to adapt their locations according to the information transmission regularity in the network so as to reduce their energy consumption for the information transmission. The experimental results indicate that after employed the proposed approach to adapt locations, the energy consumption for the information transmission of sensors in a mobile wireless sensor network can be greatly reduced and their lifetime is extended.