Coordination Based Motion Control in Mobile Wireless Sensor Network

In the present scenario, there are substantial amount of application where mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) would be better choice over the static wireless sensor network. The very nature of the MWSN environment requires sensor nodes to interact opportunistically to address a common goal. Coverage is one of those areas where MWSN provides better solution. Coverage in static WSN depends on the initial deployment strategy. Most of the recent works in MWSN propose re-deployment strategy with the help of mobile nodes. In MWSN, the mobility of sensor nodes can be utilized to enhance the coverage of the network. One of the fundamental problems of MWSN is how to coordinate these mobile sensors in such a way that they can move together to accomplish the given task. Here, we study a generalized case of this problem. In this paper, we present a coordination based motion control (CBMC) scheme where all mobile nodes form a cooperative group such that they cover an area by exchanging some key information between themselves. The proposed scheme has two objectives: (i) each sensor node travels a minimum distance, (ii) minimum overlap in the coverage path of sensor nodes. NS-3 simulation shows the effectiveness of CBMC scheme. The proposed scheme is compared with random way-point mobility model (RWP) and three other variants of RWP.