Weighted Targets Patrolling mechanisms in mobile WSNs

Target coverage problem has received much attention in the past few years. In a large monitoring environment where targets are distributed over the monitoring region, deploying static sensors will lead to the problem of high hardware cost and long latency for data collection. This paper considers the target patrolling problem which asks a set of mobile data mules to efficiently patrol a set of given targets within a predefined time constraint. The given targets might have different weights such that target with larger weight are more important and should be visited by the mobile data mules more frequently. This paper proposes a Time-Constrained Weighted Targets Patrolling (TCWTP) Algorithm, aiming at locally constructing an efficient patrolling route for a set of given data mules such that the visiting intervals of all target points are stable. Performance study reveals that the proposed TCWTP algorithm has a stable average visiting interval for each POI.