Covering Points of Interest with Mobile Sensors

The coverage of Points of Interest (PoI) is a classical requirement in mobile wireless sensor applications. Optimizing the sensors self-deployment over a PoI while maintaining the connectivity between the sensors and the base station is thus a fundamental issue. This paper addresses the problem of autonomous deployment of mobile sensors that need to cover a predefined PoI with a connectivity constraint. In our algorithm, each sensor moves toward a PoI but has also to maintain the connectivity with a subset of its neighboring sensors that are part of the Relative Neighborhood Graph (RNG). The Relative Neighborhood Graph reduction is chosen so that global connectivity can be provided locally. Our deployment scheme minimizes the number of sensors used for connectivity thus increasing the number of monitoring sensors. Analytical results, simulation results and practical implementation are provided to show the efficiency of our algorithm.