Exploring load-balance to dispatch mobile sensors in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, a hybrid sensor network consisting of static and mobile sensors is considered, where static sensors are used to detect events, and mobile sensors can move to event locations to conduct more advanced analysis. By exploring the load balance concept, we propose a CentralSD algorithm to efficiently dispatch mobile sensors. Our algorithm is general in that the numbers of mobile sensors and events can be arbitrary. When mobile sensors are more than event locations, we transform the dispatch problem to a maximum-matching problem in a weighted bipartite graph. When there are fewer mobile sensors than event locations, we propose an efficient clustering scheme to group event locations so that the maximum-matching approach can still be applied. To reduce message cost, we also develop a distributed GridSD algorithm. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.