Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of many sensor nodes, gathering data from the environment and sending it to base station (BS). One of the major challenges in WSNs is coverage maintenance. Since batteries provide sensor nodes' energy, battery depletion leads to the death of sensor nodes; when several nodes are dead, connectivity is lost, and network coverage fails. This paper proposed a method consisting of two phases to provide and maintain coverage in WSNs. In the first phase, hole detection is performed through a simple distributed method with low overhead. Nodes explore whether there are holes around them or not. In the second phase, coverage holes are covered by mobile nodes. When the number of holes exceeds mobile nodes, the holes with the highest priority and the shortest distance to mobile nodes will be selected. The performance of the proposed method (HDRM) was compared with Dezfuli et al. method, PEAS‐LI, CACA, Dezfuli et al. method, and Verma et al. method in terms of average coverage percentage, the average number of alive nodes, energy consumption, and network lifetime. The results of the simulation reveal that the proposed method leads to a decrease in the energy consumption of network, an increase in network lifetime, and improved coverage in the network.