Age of information optimal UAV swarm-assisted sweep coverage in wireless sensor networks

For sweep coverage in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the freshness of data directly affects the efficiency of task execution, and time is needed to continuously cover points of interest (POIs) to ensure obtaining all the data. However, existing studies ignored both. The outdated data and missing data may lead to decision-making errors, resulting in significant losses. To address this issue, this paper proposes a simultaneous sweep mode and a batch sweep mode of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm to achieve sweep coverage in WSNs, considering the freshness of data and the continuous coverage time of POIs, where the age of information (AoI) is adopted to measure the freshness of data. The target is to minimize the average AoI of POIs under the continuous coverage time constraint and the constraints of UAV swarm. Firstly, the POIs are clustered to obtain the best sweep points. Then, the UAV swarm sweep coverage (USSC) algorithm is designed for the two sweep modes. Finally, various simulations are conducted to verify the performance of the USSC algorithm. Simulation results show that the USSC algorithm can effectively minimize the average AoI compared to baseline algorithms. The script of the proposed algorithm can be found from: https://github.com/lilibeat/USSC.