Energy-Efficient and Delay Sensitive Routing Paths Using Mobility Prediction in Mobile WSN: Mathematical Optimization, Markov Chains, and Deep Learning Approaches

In Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks there could be scenarios where absolutely all network nodes (including the base station) are mobile, becoming a very hard task to find a communication path between a sensor node and the base station due to many network variables are changing at each moment. In addition, there are delay-sensitive applications that require establishing communication paths as soon as possible to mitigate low network performance in terms of end-to-end delay, reducing, at the same time, the energy consumption of the network. For this reason, we propose a multiobjective mathematical optimization model for finding the optimal communication path between a source node and a sink (base station) considering hard scenarios where all network nodes are mobile and minimizing end-to-end delay and energy consumption. This mathematical model would offer significant advantages to evaluate new algorithms due to we could know how far or close are the algorithm results from the optimal values given by the mathematical model. In addition, we propose a prediction distributed routing algorithm based on Markov Chains that takes into account the network mobility in order to find as fast as possible a communication path between a source node and a sink with minimal energy consumption. We also propose a deep learning approach to predict future nodes’ distances in a mobile network to determine if future movements of nodes will cause communication disruptions in paths. Significant findings were obtained when the Markov Chains and Deep Learning approaches were compared in terms of predicting nodes mobility and reducing the delay and the energy consumption in the network. The performance of our prediction algorithms (Markov Chains and Deep Learning approaches) is evaluated against the mathematical model to determine how good it is. Finally, to analyze our prediction algorithms considering real online scenarios, we compared it against typical routing algorithms, obtaining promising results in terms of delay and energy consumption in all mobile node scenarios.