A game theory-based approach for robots deploying wireless sensor nodes

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are deployed in many fields of application. Depending on the application requirements, sensor nodes can either be mobile and autonomous or static. In both cases, they are able to cooperate together in order to monitor a given area or some given Points of Interest (PoIs). Static sensor nodes need one or several agent(s) (humans or robots) to deploy them. In this paper, we focus on the deployment of static sensor nodes in an area containing obstacles, using two mobile robots. We want to minimize the time needed by the two robots to deploy all the sensor nodes and to return to their starting position. We require that each sensor node is placed at a PoI position, no PoI position is empty and no PoI position is occupied by more than one sensor node. The problem consists in determining the best strategy for each robot in order to meet these constraints. We adopt a game theory approach to solve this problem. © 2015 IEEE.