Energy-Efficient Coverage Hole Self-Repair in Mobile Sensor Networks

With the advancement of MEMS techniques, mobile sensors with low cost and high capability are being deployed widely to carry out all kinds of complicated, risky tasks in large scale networks, especially in the areas are inaccessible to the human. Mobile sensors, which have the function of self-detection and self-repair, are desirable to solve the problem of failure of sensors, which causes costly maintenance expenditure and fatal loss. In this paper, we propose a novel heuristic self-repair algorithm to fix coverage holes in sensor networks using mobile nodes. The algorithm works successfully and efficiently to cover holes using reasonable numbers of mobile sensors. Numerical simulation results show our algorithm is near optimal for small coverage holes in terms of the metrics in number of mobile sensors, time and space complexity compared to optimal scheme. Our scheme is especially suitable for repairing multiple irregular areas of coverage holes simultaneously.