Movement strategies for improving barrier coverage in wireless sensor networks: A survey

Barrier coverage is an important issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which guarantees to detect any intruder attempting to cross a barrier or penetrating a protected region monitored by sensor networks. The fundamental issue is to form sensor barriers such that the area covered by the sensors in a barrier can form a continuous fence for intrusion detection. Recently, using mobile sensors for improving network barrier coverage performance has attracted much attention. In this article, we categorize three typical application scenarios, namely, mending barrier gaps, constructing defense barriers, and sweeping sensor barriers. We highlight the issues and identify the objectives of improving barrier coverage by leveraging mobile sensors and survey recent contributions on the design of mobile sensors´ movement strategy in each application scenario.