Improving sensing coverage of wireless sensor networks by employing mobile robots

To provide proper coverage of their random deployment regions, wireless sensor networks (WSN) should employ abundant nodes. In this paper we correct such situations by employing some mobile robots as mobile nodes in WSN which can actively move to desired locations for repairing the broken networks. According to the pre-research work we know that the number of nodes employed by WSN is closely relevant to quality of service (QoS) in sensing coverage when the nodes are randomly deployed in the target region. A modified particle swarm optimization (PSO) named particle swarm genetic optimization (PSGO), which imports selection and mutation operators in PSO to overcome the premature fault of classical PSO, is proposed to redeploy the mobile robots according to the node density for repairing the sensing coverage hole after their initial random deployment. It is suggested by the simulated experiment results that the WSN employing the mobile robots can improve the QoS in sensing coverage than the stationary WSN by redeploying mobile robots according to the node density.