Area Coverage Vs Event Detection in Mixed Sensor Networks

Abstract

AbstractThis paper considers the problem of improving the monitoring capability of a sparse stationary sensor network by using mobile sensor nodes and addresses the trade off between area coverage and fast event detection. Though these are two similar objectives, they can lead to two different strategies. In this context, this paper derives the optimal search path strategy for minimizing the event detection time in the case of two uncovered regions. Finding the optimal searching path is an NP-hard problem, which implies that we can not find the optimal solution of an arbitrary problem instance in reasonable time, due to large number of uncovered regions and mobile nodes. Thus using the principles of the derived solution, an efficient and distributed path planning strategy is also presented for the general case. Simulation results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.