Run to Potential: Sweep Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Wireless sensor networks have become a promising technology in monitoring physical world. In many applications with wireless sensor networks, it is essential to understand how well an interested area is monitored (covered) by sensors. The traditional way of evaluating sensor coverage requires that every point in the field should be monitored and the sensor network should be connected to transmit messages to a processing center (sink). Such a requirement is too strong to be financially practical in many scenarios. In this study, we address another type of coverage problem, sweep coverage, when we utilize mobile nodes as supplementary in a sparse and probably disconnected sensor network. Different from previous coverage problem, we focus on retrieving data from dynamic Points of Interest (POIs), where a sensor network does not necessarily have fixed data rendezvous points as POIs. Instead, any sensor node within the network could become a POI. We first analyze the relationship among information access delay, information access probability, and the number of required mobile nodes. We then design a distributed algorithm based on a virtual 3D map of local gradient information to guide the movement of mobile nodes to achieve sweep coverage on dynamic POIs. Using the analytical results as the guideline for setting the system parameters, we examine the performance of our algorithm compared with existing approaches.

Approximation algorithm for sweep coverage on graph

“…Recently there are several papers [5,9,16,21] found in literature in the area of sweep coverage problem. In [9], Du et al proposed two different heuristics for different movement constraints on the mobile sensors.…”

ACO-Based Sweep Coverage Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…There has been massive work done on sweep coverage problem in WSN [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Cheng et al are the first to introduce the concept of sweep coverage and propose its potential applications [2].…”

“…The DSWEEP algorithm may cause the problem of some POIs which cannot be covered. A distributed algorithm based on a virtual 3D map of local gradient information to guide the movement of mobile nodes to achieve sweep coverage on dynamic POIs is proposed [5]. This method cannot discover the relative direction for each neighborhood and may cause a problem that all the mobile sensors may be guided to have the same path.…”

Periodic Sweep Coverage Scheme Based on Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem

“…Each time information is collected at a POI, the mobile sensor decides and chooses the next POI to move to according to its local coverage information. A distributed sweep coverage scheme based on local gradients is proposed by Xi et al [7], in which the static sensors are placed at POIs. When the sensors detect the occurrence of an incident at their POI, the sensors increase their gradients, and broadcast them to the neighbor sensors at the same time.…”