Movement-efficient Sensor Deployment in Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of optimizing sensor deployment in mobile wireless sensor networks by balancing sensing coverage and energy consumption, proposing algorithms that outperform existing methods.

Contribution

It models sensor deployment as a constrained source coding problem and develops Lloyd-like algorithms for optimal coverage under energy constraints.

Findings

Algorithms outperform existing relocation strategies.

Derived necessary conditions for optimal deployment.

Effective trade-off between coverage and energy consumption.

Abstract

We study a mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) consisting of multiple mobile sensors or robots. Two key issues in MWSNs - energy consumption, which is dominated by sensor movement, and sensing coverage - have attracted plenty of attention, but the interaction of these issues is not well studied. To take both sensing coverage and movement energy consumption into consideration, we model the sensor deployment problem as a constrained source coding problem. %, which can be applied to different coverage tasks, such as area coverage, target coverage, and barrier coverage. Our goal is to find an optimal sensor deployment to maximize the sensing coverage with specific energy constraints. We derive necessary conditions to the optimal sensor deployment with (i) total energy constraint and (ii) network lifetime constraint. Using these necessary conditions, we design Lloyd-like algorithms to provide a trade-off between sensing coverage and energy consumption. Simulation results show that our algorithms outperform the existing relocation algorithms.