Navigation protocols in sensor networks 
From: ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN)

TOSN "publishes papers reporting significant results in the research and
applications of distributed, wireless or wireline sensor and actuator
networks. As an interdisciplinary field, sensor networks draw upon many
disciplines including signal processing, networking and protocols, embedded
systems, information management, and distributed algorithms. Potential
synergies among these fields are expected to open up new research
directions." 

The first issue contains a paper on navigation using sensor networks to
direct user flow. Could this work be repurposed to assist mobility for the
blind?  

"We develop distributed algorithms for adaptive sensor networks that respond
to directing a target through a region of space. We model this problem as an
online distributed motion planning problem. Each sensor node senses values in
its perception space and has the ability to trigger exceptions events we call
"danger" and model as "obstacles". The danger/obstacle landscape changes over
time. We present algorithms for computing distributed maps in perception
space and for using these maps to compute adaptive paths for a mobile node
that can interact with the sensor network. We give the analysis to the
protocol and report on hardware experiments using a physical sensor network
consisting of Mote sensors. We also show how to reduce searching space and
communication cost using Voronoi diagram." 

Authors: Qun Li, College of William and Mary
         Daniela Rus, MIT

See:  http://www.acm.org/sigaccess/leftfield/ 

Reference to the full article can be found at:
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1077391.1077393

Article in PDF:
http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1077393&type=pdf&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=52644010&CFTOKEN=19537853

Contributed by Simon Harper and Vicki L. Hanson
