Conference
Version
N. Bartolini, T. Calamoneri, E. Fusco, A. Massini, S. Silvestri
Abstract
Mobile sensor networks are important for a number of strategic applications devoted to monitoring critical areas. Coverage completeness and uniformity determine the effectiveness of the sensor deployment. Despite the primary importance of such features, the initial sensor deployment of many applications is neither complete nor uniform, as sensors are sent from a safe location or dropped from an aircraft. The use of mobile sensors permits a dynamic reconfiguration of the sensor deployment. Sensors should coordinate their movements to quickly reach a more satisfactory deployment while minimizing the total traversed distance and the number of message exchanges. Existing distributed solutions either do not guarantee complete coverage or do not lead to a stable deployment. In this paper we propose a fully distributed algorithm for autonomous deployment of mobile sensors called Snap and Spread, which is based on the interleaved execution of four basic activities. According to our proposal, movement decisions are made by each sensor on the basis of locally available information and do not require any prior knowledge of the operating conditions nor any manual tuning of key parameters. We prove that, unlike previous proposals, our approach guarantees a complete coverage, provided that a sufficient number of sensors are available. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the algorithm execution always terminates preventing movement oscillations. Extensive simulations show that our algorithm reaches a complete coverage within reasonable time with moderate energy consumption, even when the target area has irregular shapes. Performance comparisons between Snap and Spread and one of the most acknowledged algorithms show how the former can reach a more uniform and complete coverage under a wide range of working scenarios, with lower energy consumption.
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