Signal strength based scheme for following mobile IoT devices in dynamic environments

The increased maturity level of technological achievements towards the realization of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision allowed sophisticated solutions to emerge, offering reliable monitoring in highly dynamic environments that lack well-defined and well-designed infrastructures, such as in the case of disaster scenarios. In this paper, we use a bio-inspired IoT architecture, which allows flexible creation and discovery of sensor-based services offering self-organization and self-optimization properties to the dynamic network, in order to make the required monitoring information available. The main contribution of the paper is the introduction of a new algorithm for following mobile monitored targets/individuals in the context of an IoT system, especially a dynamic one as the aforementioned. The devised technique, called Hot-Cold, is able to ensure proximity maintenance by the tracking robotic device solely based on the strength of the RF signal broadcasted by the target to communicate its sensors' data. Complete geometrical, numerical, simulation, and convergence analyses of the proposed technique are thoroughly presented, along with a detailed simulation-based evaluation that reveals the higher following accuracy of Hot-Cold compared to the popular concept of trilateration-based tracking. Finally, a prototype of the full architecture was implemented to demonstrate the applicability of the presented approach for monitoring in dynamic environments, but also the operability of the introduced tracking technique.