A distributed coverage optimization and connectivity maintenance strategy based on unknown sensors in WSAN

Wireless sensor and actor network (WSAN) has received growing interests with the rapid development of Internet of things. Multiple function actors are added into the traditional wireless sensor networks to sense the environment, conduct tasks and give feedback. In this paper, an efficient distributed actor deployment strategy is proposed to address the connectivity maintenance and coverage optimization issues in WSAN with the consideration of unknown sensors' locations. In this proposed strategy, an artificial potential force based algorithm is utilized to detect the unknown sensors, and a fully distributed link deletion algorithm is introduced to delete redundant communication links thus expanding the search area. Then, an actor location optimization algorithm is developed based on the Voronoi diagram method to get a better coverage result. The global connectivity of the actors is guaranteed during the entire process. The performances of proposed strategy are validated analytically and experimentally.