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You can’t get there from here: sensor scheduling with refocusing delays

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Abstract

We study a problem in which a single sensor is scheduled to observe sites periodically, motivated by applications in which the goal is to maintain up-to-date readings for all the observed sites. In the existing literature, it is typically assumed that the time for a sensor switching from one site to another is negligible. This may not be the case in applications such as camera surveillance of a border, however, in which the camera takes time to pan and tilt to refocus itself to a new geographical location. We formulate a problem with constraints modeling refocusing delays. We prove the problem to be NP-hard and then study a special case in which refocusing is proportional to some Euclidian metric. We give a lower bound on the optimal cost for the scheduling problem, and we derive exact solutions for some special cases of the problem. Finally, we provide and experimentally evaluate several heuristic algorithms, some of which are based on the computed lower bound, for the setting of one sensor and many sites.

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Acknowledgments

This research was sponsored by US Army Research laboratory and the UK Ministry of Defence and was accomplished under Agreement Number W911NF-06-3-0001. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the US Army Research Laboratory, the US Government, the UK Ministry of Defence, or the UK Government. The US and UK Governments are authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

    Yosef Alayev

  2. Computer and Information Science, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

    Amotz Bar-Noy

  3. Computer Science, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

    Matthew P. Johnson

  4. Sensors and Electron Device Directorate, U.S. Army Research Lab, Adelphi, MD, USA

    Lance Kaplan

  5. Computer Science and Engineering, Penn State University, State College, PA, USA

    Thomas F. La Porta

Authors
  1. Yosef Alayev
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  2. Amotz Bar-Noy
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  3. Matthew P. Johnson
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  4. Lance Kaplan
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  5. Thomas F. La Porta
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yosef Alayev.

Additional information

Conference version of the paper appeared in IEEE MASS’10.

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Alayev, Y., Bar-Noy, A., Johnson, M.P. et al. You can’t get there from here: sensor scheduling with refocusing delays. Wireless Netw 21, 1683–1698 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-014-0873-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-014-0873-0

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