A PTAS to minimize mobile sensor movement for target coverage problem

Energy consumption is a fundamental and critical issue in wireless sensor networks. Mobile sensors consume much more energy during the movement than that during the communication or sensing process. Thus how to schedule mobile sensors and minimize their moving distance has great significance to researchers. In this paper, we study the target coverage problem in mobile sensor networks. Our goal is to minimize the moving distance of sensors to cover all targets in the surveillance region. Here initially all the sensors are located at k base stations. Thus we define this problem as k-Sink Minimum Movement Target Coverage. To solve this problem, we propose a PTAS, named Energy Effective Movement Algorithm (EEMA). We can divide EEMA into two phases. In the first phase, we partition the surveillance region into some subareas. In the second phase, we select subareas and schedule sensors to the selected subareas. We also prove that the approximation ratio of EEMA is 1 + ε and the time complexity is ηO(1/ε2 Finally, we conduct experiments to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of EEMA.