ORACLE: Mobility control in wireless sensor and actor networks

Mobile actor is a promising tool for wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) provisioning energy and time efficient data collection. In this paper, we study actors' mobility control in WSANs for efficient events detecting in terms of time and energy consumption. We introduce an innovative approach ORACLE, to make actors predict events before sensors detection and migrate to the areas where the event may occur. In specific, we propose an event prediction scheme to predict an event from collected sensory data by utilizing the maximum likelihood estimation. Based on the perception, we design a control policy of actor's mobility pattern with Markov decision process. ORACLE not only enables minimal motion of actors which conserves time and energy to reach the event areas but also is energy-efficiency for sensors to reduce the forwarding range for event detection message. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme through extensive experimental analysis. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.