Stochastic event capture using mobile sensors under linear case

Abstract

The quality of coverage achieved by mobile sensors depends on the velocity, mobility pattern, number of mobile sensors deployed and the dynamics of the phenomenon being sensed. The gains attained by mobile sensors over static sensors and the optimal motion strategies for mobile sensors are not well understood. In this paper we consider the following event capture problem: The events of interest arrive at certain points in the sensor field and disappear according to known arrival and departure time distributions. An event is said to be captured if it is sensed by one of the mobile sensors before it fades away. We analyze how the quality of coverage scales with velocity and number of mobile sensors. We present algorithm for the motion planning problem: for sensors with fixed speed, what is the minimum number of sensors required to satisfy a bound on the event loss probability? For the minimum sensor problem, when the robots are restricted to move along a line our algorithm return the number of sensors used is within a factor of two of the optimal solution. Simulation experiments show that the Superiority of the proposed algorithm.