Event Coverage in Sparse Mobile Sensor Networks

Autonomous mobile sensors are employed with ever-increasing frequency, in applications ranging from search and rescue, detection of forest fires, and battlefield surveillance. In this paper, we consider a representative surveillance problem wherein a sparse number of mobile sensors are expected to cover events of interest in a deployment field. Each event appears for a certain time and then disappears. Furthermore, the location of each event and its duration is unknown. In this paper, we design a sensor movement strategy based on efficient traversal in the network to fulfill two objectives: maximizing event detection, and minimizing detection delay. Analysis and simulations demonstrate the performance of our algorithm from the perspective of event detection and delay with respect to the number of sensors, movement velocity, and the number and duration of events.