Mission-critical management of mobile sensors: or, how to guide a flock of sensors

This work addresses the problem of optimizing the deployment of sensors in order to ensure the quality of the readings of the value of interest in a given (critical) geographic region. As usual, we assume that each sensor is capable of reading a particular physical phenomenon (e.g., concentration of toxic materials in the air) and transmitting it to a server or a peer. However, the key assumptions considered in this work are: 1. each sensor is capable of moving (where the motion may be remotely controlled); and 2. the spatial range for which the individual sensor's reading is guaranteed to be of a desired quality is limited. In scenarios like disaster management and homeland security, in case some of the sensors dispersed in a larger geographic area report a value higher than a certain threshold, one may want to ensure a quality of the readings for the affected region. This, in turn, implies that one may want to ensure that there are enough sensors there and, consequently, guide a subset of the rest of the sensors towards the affected region. In this paper we explore variants of the problem of optimizing the guidance of the mobile sensors towards the affected geographic region and we present algorithms for their solutions.

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