Mobile sensor nodes scheduling for bounded region coverage

Abstract

Mobile elements have shown the advantages in wireless sensor networks not only in data collection and transmission but also in the field of region coverage. The mobile sensor nodes (MSNs) whose mobility is controlled, visits the predetermined locations and collects the environmental information as per the procedure called MSNs traversal algorithms. The major performance bottleneck in MSNs is the energy source which is impractical to replace after the deployment. In random deployment, single or a group of MSNs may fall at the same location or at different locations, whose starting positions of traversal and traversal paths may differ from the preplanned. This work formulates the problem of scheduling the MSNs in distributed manner so that the entire region is covered without coverage holes with minimum energy depletion. Finally, some computationally practical algorithms for multiple MSNs with fault and non-fault tolerant support are presented and their performances compared.