A Sensor Relocation Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the past few years wireless sensor networks have received a greater interest in application such as disaster management, border protection, combat field reconnaissance and security surveillance. Sensor nodes are expected to operate autonomously in unattended environments and potentially in large numbers. WSNs cannot be deployed manually in a hostile or harsh environment. Thus, WSNs can be formed by dropping them from the air. However, random deployment of sensor nodes can leave holes in terms of coverage in the sensing area. Moreover, sensor nodes failure may cause connectivity loss and in some cases network partitioning. The mobile devices can be used as an orthogonal method to address the network connectivity, coverage, and network life time problems in WSNs. Mobile sensors are useful as they can move to locations that meet sensing coverage requirements. In this paper we propose a novel sensor relocation scheme where redundant mobile nodes are moved to heal coverage holes in the network. We evaluate this work by simulations and show that our approach outperforms others in terms of relocation time and total energy consumption.