Distributed deployment algorithms in a network of nonidentical mobile sensors subject to location estimation error

In this paper, we study sensor deployment algorithms in the presence of location estimation error. Existing Voronoi-based mobile sensor deployment algorithms require location awareness to guarantee a simple coverage detection, and they miss the mark if the location information is inaccurate. But, it is often expensive to include a GPS receiver in each node, and location information is inaccurate as sensors estimate locations from the messages they receive. We propose a new Voronoi-based diagram, named guaranteed additively weighted Voronoi diagram (GAWVD), that guarantees the coverage hole detection for each cell individually, provided that upper bounds on localization errors are assumed. Although location inaccuracy would appear to deteriorate the total coverage, our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can exploit this inaccuracy to improve the network coverage.