Intelligent Service Robotics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-018-0249-x ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER An efficient cooperative exploration strategy for wireless sensor network Assia Belbachir 1,2 · Sorore Benabid 1,3 Received: 9 August 2017 / Accepted: 27 February 2018 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used in several applications such as healthcare devices, aerospace systems, automobile industry, security monitoring. However, WSNs have several challenges to improve the efficiency, robustness, failure tolerance and reliability of these sensors. Thus, cooperation between sensors is an important deal that increases sensor trust. Cooperative WSNs can be used to optimize the exploration of an unknown area in a distributed way. In this paper, the distributed Markovian model strategy that is used due to their past state-dependent reasoning. Moreover, the exploration strategy depends totally on the wireless communication protocol. Hence, in this paper, we propose an efficient cooperative strategy based on cognitive radio and software-defined radio which are promising technologies that increase spectral utilization and optimize the use of radio resources. We implement a distributed exploration strategy (DES) in mobile robots, and several experiments have been performed to localize targets while avoiding obstacles. Experiments were performed with several exploration robots. A comparison with another exploration strategy shows that DES improves the robots exploration. Keywords Exploration strategy · Cognitive radio · Software-defined radio · Wireless sensor network 1 Introduction Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are daily gaining place in our lives from intelligent transport [14] to healthcare applications [2]. WSN is composed by several sensor nodes that are usually scattered in an area of deployment. WSNs coordinate themselves to give information related to the phys- ical environment. Each sensor node bases its decisions on its own collected information. Then, these sensors commu- nicate either among each other or directly to an external Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-018-0249-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. B Assia Belbachir assia.belbachir@ipsa.fr Sorore Benabid sorore.benabid@ipsa.fr 1 Polytechnic Institute of Advanced Sciences (IPSA), 63 Boulevard de Brandebourg, 94200 Ivry-sur-Seine, France 2 UPMC Univ Paris 06, SMA-LIP6, Sorbonne Universities, Paris, France 3 UPMC Univ Paris 06, CIAN-LIP6, Sorbonne Universities, Paris, France base-station, for example, to detect anomalies in the health- care environment. However, these WSNs are affected by the low quality of sensor nodes and their short lifetime. Conse- quently, one strategy to reduce these disadvantages is the use of diversity [26,27] and share information coming from other sensor nodes to provide more faithful information. In our case of study, we consider a set of sensor nodes located in the mobile robot as shown in Fig. 1. Each robot can communicate with the robots that are in their range of coverage. Sharing information between nodes depends on two factors: the defined cooperative strategy and the wireless communication protocol. The cooperative strategy represents the policy that chooses next area to explore. To optimize this strategy, information coming from larger-scale nodes of the environment improves the exploration strategy of each nodes. However, the inconvenient of this strategy is that all the nodes can converge to explore the same area. Thus, we need to define an adequate cooperative exploration strategy which avoid redundant exploration. In this paper, we are interested to explore an area to local- ize the maximal number of targets. Cooperative exploration strategies allow to exchange data between two or several nodes. We will focus our work on distributed cooperative exploration strategies. Due to the reduced memory of sensor 123