Abstract
In the mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) field, there exists an important problem—how can we quickly form an MWSN to cover a designated working area on the ground using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm? This problem is of significance in many military and civilian applications. In this paper, inspired by intermolecular forces, a novel molecular force field-based optimal deployment algorithm for a UAV swarm is proposed to solve this problem. A multi-rotor UAV swarm is used to carry sensors and quickly build an MWSN in a designated working area. The necessary minimum number of UAVs is determined according to the principle that the coverage area of any three UAVs has the smallest overlap. Based on the geometric properties of a convex polygon, two initialization methods are proposed to make the initial deployment more uniform, following which, the positions of all UAVs are subsequently optimized by the proposed molecular force field-based deployment algorithm. Simulation experiment results show that the proposed algorithm, when compared with three existing algorithms, can obtain the maximum coverage ratio for the designated working area thanks to the proposed initialization methods. The probability of falling into a local optimum and the computational complexity are reduced, while the convergence rate is improved.
Highlights
A mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) is a wireless network formed by a large number of mobile sensor nodes deployed in a designated area
We found the virtual force algorithm (VFA)-based algorithm to be suitable for solving the coverage problem in our application scenario, as it is simple and efficient and does not require a centralized computing mechanism during implementation as long as the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can perform distributed computing in the same connected MWSN
As for Test 1, because the number of used UAVs was too small, the coverage ratio was not improved by the proposed deployment algorithm; relying only on the initialization methods, an acceptable deployment scheme could be obtained, whose coverage ratio was about the same as the other three algorithms
Summary
A mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) is a wireless network formed by a large number of mobile sensor nodes deployed in a designated area. How to deploy the mobile sensors is a fundamental problem in MWSN [1], as it greatly influences the performance of the coverage of the network. It is difficult to manually deploy the MWSN in special environments, such as unknown, hostile, or disaster areas [2]. To solve this problem, it is possible to use a multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm to carry the sensors and build the network autonomously. The reason for choosing multi-rotor UAVs (abbreviated as UAVs below) is that they have some key characteristics, such as high flexibility [3,4], high speed, airborne hovering ability [5,6], and being unrestricted by terrain or obstacles
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