Optimal Formulation for Maximizing Area Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Nodes

Traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)use stationary sensor nodes to sense relevant events in their vicinity and relay this information for further analysis. These nodes may fail to cover the entire search space either due to inaccurate placement, an insufficient number of nodes or failure of some nodes, resulting in ‘coverage holes.’ Mobile nodes can be deployed, in such cases, to visit the coverage holes and collect the necessary data. It is critical to plan the path taken by these mobile nodes to maximize area coverage and minimize trip time. In this paper, we propose a novel Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP)formulation, to determine the path taken by the mobile node. The goal is to find a route that achieves the specified level of coverage in the least amount of time. We have run simulations with different WSN sizes and sensing capabilities of the sensor nodes to evaluate the proposed MILP.