Fast dynamic deployment of mobile sensor networks for the changing monitoring requirements

Abstract

Nowadays, there have been a lot of applications such as industrial diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and battlefield surveillance in sensor networks. One of the most important performance metrics for sensor networks is coverage, because it reflects how well a surveillance region is monitored. In this paper, we demonstrate a maximum coverage deployment problem in multistatic radar system (MSRS) which is one kind of sensor networks. Given the changing monitoring requirements, we consider dynamically deploying MSRS. A coverage ratio is utilized as the objective function to build the optimization problem and evaluate the monitor performance. The key mechanism in this problem is to fast dynamic deploy the sensor networks to achieve maximum coverage. Since it is needed to jointly consider the positions of all sensors and the objective function is complicated, the optimization problem is of huge computational load, and thus we propose an algorithm based on genetic algorithm (GA) to deal with it. Numerical results verify the validity of the proposed algorithm and its superiority in computational complexity. Our contributions include a novel model of sensor networks dynamic deployment and an efficient solution to the proposed problem.