Dynamic Point Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Learning Automata Approach

Point coverage in wireless sensor networks is the problem of detecting some stationary or moving target points in the area of the network using as little sensor nodes as possible. This can be accomplished using different deployment strategies, rearrangement of nodes using a moving strategy, or designing a suitable schedule for making nodes on and off in such a way that in each time slice, only nodes which can sense the target points in that period are on. With dynamic point coverage, we refer to the problem of point coverage, where target points are moving, and hence rearrangement or scheduling should be dynamically adapted to the changing position of targets. In this paper, we propose a novel method for the problem of dynamic point coverage in wireless sensor networks using learning automata. Each node is equipped with a learning automaton which will learn (schedule) the proper on and off times of that node based on the movement nature of a single moving target.