Distributed dynamic navigation for sensor networks

Navigation with sensor networks has shown many advantages and great potential in many scenarios. Previous works have mainly focused on selecting the shortest path to navigate an internal user out of an emergency field. However, they did not consider variations of the dangerous areas which usually occur in practical applications. This paper presents an efficient dynamic routing algorithm to successfully guide users to the destination exit. The navigation goal is looking for a safe and short path to enable the user to escape from a dangerous area as fast as possible. Without knowing the locations of the nodes, the user is guided by a sequence of sensor nodes to pass through the dangerous areas. The algorithm ensures the navigation path security by predicting the dynamic changes affecting the navigation path. The performance of this approach is evaluated using extensive simulations to validate its effectiveness. Simulations show that the approach is scalable and performs well in various settings. © 2011 Tsinghua University Press.