Linear time algorithm for computing min‐max movement of sink‐based mobile sensors for line barrier coverage

Abstract

AbstractWitnessing broad energy‐critical applications of barrier coverage in mobile and wireless sensor networks, emerging practical applications have recently brought a new barrier coverage model which uses sink‐based mobile sensors for covering a given barrier with the aim of prolonging the lifespan of the coverage. In the model, a set of sink stations were distributed on the plane in which each sink can emit mobile sensors with an identical radius. The task is to cover a given line barrier with the emitted mobile sensors, aiming to minimize the maximum movement of the sensors so as to prolong the shortest lifespan among the sensors in coverage. In this paper, we first devise an algorithm for optimally solving the problem based on the properties of the structures called movement parity and tangent equilibrium points between the sinks. Then based on a more sophisticated geometric property of optimum solutions, we improve the runtime to a linear runtime O(k) which attains the possibly optimum runtime of the problem for k being the number of sinks. At last, numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the practical performance gain of our algorithms against baselines in literature.