- Project name: New Method Of Maintaining Mobile Ad Hoc Network Connectivity For Environmental Monitoring Purposes
- Project goal: Controlling the nodes of a mobile ad hoc network for use in monitoring the environment in such crisis situations as earthquakes, uncontrollable heavy gas leaks or search and rescue missions after a hurricane.
Mobile ad hoc networks are seeing increasing use for monitoring the environment in crisis situations, including earthquakes, heavy gas leaks or search and rescue operations after a hurricane. Such situations frequently lead to the destruction, malfunction or overloading of existing communication infrastructure. In addition, individual network nodes must exchange information to coordinate operations and must also be connected to a crisis management centre to receive commands and relay data acquired on-site. Therefore, it is necessary to enable individual nodes to communicate (maintain network connectivity) when a network is operating.
Existing solutions for maintaining network connectivity greatly reduce network performance with regard to its purpose (e.g. area monitoring). The project makes use of the CMC (Connectivity Maintenance with Cooperation) [1] method, which is based on a mechanism of node cooperation. The purpose of the mechanism is to increase the area possible to be monitored, which is generally greatly restricted due to the need to maintain network connectivity. The mechanism can be easily added to the majority of currently existing connectivity measures.
The CMC approach was tested in a simulation experiment. The MobASim [2] mobile ad hoc network simulation environment was used for the simulation, expanded to include a heavy gas dispersion model and the CMC method. The purpose of the experimental network was to detect an area covered in a heavy gas cloud. The network consisted of 16 nodes grouped into 4 clusters. The simulated heavy gas leak was a chlorine leak from a source with a 0.1m2 cross-section and with a pace of 33 kg/s and wind speed of 3 m/s. The topology of the network at selected points in time is presented in Figure 1. The network retains connectivity, and the CMC method renders it possible to monitor a significant part of the gas-covered area.
Fig. 1. Sensor network topology (a) 65 (b) 90 (c) 135 seconds after detecting gas. Same-cluster nodes were marked with the same colour. The red lines mark existing communication connections.
Bibliography:
[2] M. Krzysztoń. The nodes cooperation for maintaining connectivity of mobile ad hoc network during phenomena cloud monitoring. Proceedings of International Interdisciplinary PhD Workshop 2017, ISBN: 978-83-7283-858-2,