Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks: Localized Movement Control Algorithms for Maintaining Coverage and Connectivity

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) are gaining growing interest because of their suitability for mission-critical applications that require autonomous and intelligent interaction with the environment. Hazardous application environments make actors susceptible to physical damage. Failure of a critical (i.e. cut-vertex) actor partitions the inter-actor network into disjointed segments while leaving a coverage hole. Maintaining inter-actor connectivity and coverage is extremely crucial in most applications of WSANs where actors have to quickly plan an optimal coordinated response to detected events. This book presents a series of localized novel algorithms that pursue controlled movement of existing (internal) actors to restore the lost connectivity while minimizing the impact on coverage. The performance of proposed approaches is analyzed and validated through extensive simulations. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of proposed approaches that outperform the best contemporary schemes found in literature. This book should be useful for university students, researchers, faculty members, application designers and people from industry.