Adaptive Scheme for Collaborative Mobile Sensing in Wireless Sensor Networks: Bacterial Foraging Optimization approach

In Wireless Sensor Networks, mobile sensing refers to the presence of one or more mobile sinks or mobile sensors, which have the main role of collecting the gathered data by sensor nodes. This paper describes a new scheme of mobile sensing that aims at providing a good coverage and throughput while maintaining better energy efficiency and high network availability. To achieve this, some features of the social foraging behavior of the Escherichia coli bacteria have been used, especially the chemotaxis and swarming processes that allow bacteria to move. Particularly, a description and a formulation of a mobile sensing scheme based on an approach inspired by the Bacterial Foraging Optimization have been provided. Models that allow mobile sinks to move over the network in a self-organized and self-adaptive way have been proposed. The proposal has been experimented in order to elaborate the impact of mobility on delay, network coverage and successful amount of collected data. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal.