Mobility-Assisted Sensor Networking for Field Coverage

Abstract

In many sensor network applications, manual or well-controlled node deployment is not practical. Random deployments, e.g., from the air, often result in unevenly distributed nodes and hence insufficient coverage. In this paper, we present a novel mobility-assisted network for field coverage, and suggest that, by introducing only a small set of mobile sensors, the field coverage can be remarkably improved. The main challenges for this mobility-assisted framework are determining the necessary coverage contribution of the mobile sensors and achieving such contribution. We develop an optimal strategy for separating the contribution from static sensors and mobile sensors. We then proposed a random walk based mobility model for the mobile sensors to achieve their necessary contribution. We demonstrate through experiment that a small set of mobile sensors can effectively solve the unbalance of the sensor distribution and significantly improve the system lifetime and coverage quality.