Coverage control with information aggregation

The aim of this paper is to incorporate information aggregation into coverage control for mobile sensor networks. In this scenario, the mobile sensor nodes serve a geographical region but in addition also communicate with a mobile sink node that aggregates the information. Finding the optimal sensor location for coverage with information aggregation is formalized by adding an appropriate term to the traditional coverage cost. We prove that the optimal partition of the space given locations of all sensor nodes is the power diagram and derive explicit expressions for the equilibrium location for all sensor nodes, including the sink node. We also design a gradient-descent motion control algorithm that drives all sensor nodes to an equilibrium configuration from arbitrary initial configuration. Numerical simulations that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed motion control algorithm are also provided.