Game theory based mobile wireless sensor network for area coverage

Abstract

In the present scenario, there are substantial amount of applications where mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) would be preferred over static wireless sensor network. Coverage is one of those areas where MWSN provides better solution. Coverage in static WSN depends on the initial deployment strategy whereas in MWSN, mobility of sensor nodes can be utilized to enhance the coverage of the network. One of the fundamental problems of MWSN is how to coordinate these mobile sensors in such a way that they can move together to accomplish the given task. Here, we study a generalized case of this problem. In this paper, we present a game theory inspired coordination based motion control (GT-CBMC) scheme where all mobile nodes form a group such that they cover an area by exchanging some key information between themselves. This is a continuation of our previous work on coordination based motion control (CBMC). The objective of the proposed scheme is to minimize the travel distance of each sensor node. The concept of cooperative game theory is used here. In this scheme, mobile sensors form a co-operative group and movement of one sensor influences the movements of its neighbors. Objective of this co-operative group is to minimize the overlap in the coverage path of sensor nodes. NS-3 simulation shows the effectiveness of the scheme. The proposed scheme is compared CBMC, random way-point mobility model (RWP) and three other variants of RWP.