Energy Efficient Mechanism for Reusing Mobile Nodes in WSN and IoT Networks

The operation of Internet of Things (IoT) networks and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is often disrupted by a number of problems, such as path disconnections, network segmentations, node faults, security attacks, etc. A method that gains momentum in resolving some of those issues is the use of mobile nodes or nodes deployed by mobile robots. The use of mobile elements essentially increases the resources and the capacity of the network. In this work, we propose a scheme that utilizes mobile nodes for the creation of alternative paths from source to sink by also accounting the energy levels of the nodes as a contributing factor regarding the creation of alternative paths. We offer both a high level description of the concept and also a detailed algorithmic solution. The evaluation of the solution was performed in a case study of resolving congestion in the network. Results have shown that the proposed algorithm can significantly contribute to the alleviation of the problem of congestion in IoT and WSNs and can easily be used for other types of network problems.