Ensuring Area Coverage in Hybrid Wireless Sensor Networks

Success of Wireless Sensor Networks largely depends whether the deployed network can provide desired coverage with acceptable network lifetime. This paper proposes a distributed protocol for ensuring area coverage using a combination of mobile and static sensor nodes. Most of the assumptions made in our approach are realistic (sensing model, movement thresholds based on real radio characteristics etc.) and implementable in real-life applications. We demonstrate that, for different type of initial deployments, our proposed movement algorithms consume only 30-40% of the energy consumed by the basic virtual force algorithm. We formulated our problem as Integer Linear Program to arrive at idealistic optimal solutions that form basis of our performance comparison. We validated our results through extensive discrete event simulations.