On the optimal search neighborhood in Mixed Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper considers the problem of improving the monitoring capability of a sparse stationary sensor network with mobile sensor nodes. The main idea is that the mobile sensors should sample the areas that are least covered (monitored) by the static sensors. Thus, a simple path planning strategy is presented that decides the next point to be visited using only “local” information. For a simplified scenario, the paper derives the optimal path strategy and extrapolates some of the properties of the scenario to a more general instance of the problem. Furthermore, the paper proposes a surrogate metric that can be used in order to determine the optimal searching neighborhood and presents extensive simulation results which indicated that this approach can achieve very good results.