Obstacle avoidance routing scheme through optimal sink movement for home monitoring and mobile robotic consumer devices

In recent years, ZigBee has been proven to be an excellent solution to create scalable and flexible home automation networks. In a home automation network, consumer devices typically collect data from a home monitoring environment and then transmit the data to an end user through multi-hop communication without the need for any human intervention. However, due to the presence of typical obstacles in a home environment, error-free reception may not be possible, particularly for power constrained devices. A mobile sink based data transmission scheme can be one solution but obstacles create significant complexities for the sink movement path determination process. Therefore, an obstacle avoidance data routing scheme is of vital importance to the design of an efficient home automation system. This paper presents a mobile sink based obstacle avoidance routing scheme for a home monitoring system. The mobile sink collects data by traversing through the obstacle avoidance path. Through ZigBee based hardware implementation and verification, the proposed scheme successfully transmits data through the obstacle avoidance path to improve network performance in terms of life span, energy consumption and reliability. The application of this work can be applied to a wide range of intelligent pervasive consumer products and services including robotic vacuum cleaners and personal security robots.

I. Introduction

Home automation networks are a significant application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) where WSN and Consumer Electronics technology work together efficiently to construct a smart home [1]–[3]. In a home automation network, smart consumer sensor nodes collect data from monitoring field and then transmit the data to the Base Station (BS) through multi- hop communication without any human intervention [4]. Different types of physical obstacles may be present in and around the home environment, e.g. walls, furniture, human body, etc. These physical obstacles can hamper the data transmission path between sensor nodes and the BS. Therefore, data reception faults or data inconsistency faults have been occurring in home automation networks [5]. An obstacle avoidance data routing scheme can alleviate and minimize reception faults and improve the performance of the home monitoring network.