PioMote: A Hierarchical Mobile Node for Maintaining the End-to-End Communication Links of Wireless Sensor Networks

A two-tier network based mobile node for maintaining the communication links is presented in this paper. The mobile node has sensing, computation, communication and locomotion components assembled by off-the-shelf modules. The proposed mobile node is able to merge IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11b/g protocols so as to acquire multimedia signals as well as regular low bandwidth data. The assessment of communication link quality and a simple PID based control scheme are illustrated in this paper as well. Inspired by virtual force method, we exploit RSSI samples as a control feedback factor into locomotion. The experimental results testify the feasibility of proposed method and show that the mobile node is competent for maintaining communication links of wireless sensor networks.

[1]  Kristofer S. J. Pister,et al.  CotsBots: an off-the-shelf platform for distributed robotics , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[2]  Jindong Tan,et al.  The maintaining of communication links quality in unknown environment , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Information and Automation.

[3]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Connectivity management in mobile robot teams , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Aiguo Song,et al.  An empirical analysis for evaluating the link quality of robotic sensor networks , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Wireless Communications & Signal Processing.

[5]  Jindong Tan.  A scalable graph model and coordination algorithms for multi-robot systems , 2005, Proceedings, 2005 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics..

[6]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Robomote: a tiny mobile robot platform for large-scale ad-hoc sensor networks , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[7]  Aiguo Song,et al.  Racemote: A Mobile Node for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2006, 2006 5th IEEE Conference on Sensors.