Parasitic mobility for sensate media

Abstract

Distributed sensor networks offer many new capabilities for monitoring environments with applicability to medical, industrial, military, anthropological, and experiential fields. By making such systems mobile, we increase the application-space for the distributed sensor network mainly by providing dynamic context-dependent deployment, continual relocatabililty, automatic node recovery, and a larger area of coverage. In existing models, the addition of actuation to sensor network nodes has exacerbated three of the main problems with these types of systems: power usage, node size, and node complexity. This work proposes a solution to these problems in the form of parasitically actuated nodes that gain their mobility and local navigational intelligence by selectively engaging and disengaging from mobile hosts in their environment. This body of work evaluates parasitically actuated sensor networks as a solution to these problems through extensive software simulation and by designing, implementing, and demonstrating a parasitically mobile sensor network.