Mobile Node Deployment in Hybrid Sensor Networks

Hybrid sensor networks consisting of both static and mobile sensor nodes attract more research interests with their enhanced capability. As mobile nodes generally have more power than static nodes, they are preferable to be used as cluster heads. In this paper, we study the mobile node deployment problem with the objective of maximizing the number of static nodes covered by the mobile nodes with minimized moving distance. We prove that this problem is NP-complete and propose a distributed deployment protocol to solve it. In the proposed protocol, different policies of selecting the moving nodes are considered to cover more static nodes with less moving distance. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves high coverage ratio with acceptable moving distance.