Distributed collaborative path planning in sensor networks with multiple mobile sensor nodes

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient distributed collaboration scheme for a team of autonomous mobile sensor nodes which enables them to navigate through a sparse sensor network with stationary nodes searching for events and improving area coverage. The mobile sensor nodes have limited communication and sensing ranges and autonomously plan their trajectories in order to enhance the probability of event detection. The main objective of this work is to investigate collaboration schemes between the sensor nodes such that each mobile samples areas not covered by the stationary or other mobile nodes. The aim is to reduce the amount of information that needs to be exchanged between nodes without significant loss of performance (in terms of area coverage).