Defending Against Barrier Intrusions with Mobile Sensors

Deploying wireless sensor networks has been recognized as one of the effective and cost-efficient ways to defend remote barrier regions such as international territorial borders. It has also been demonstrated recently that, by introducing sensor mobility into the wireless sensor network, the network coverage performance can be greatly improved. In this paper, we employ a game theoretic approach to study the problem of defending against barrier intrusions with mobile sensors, and demonstrate the equilibriums between barrier intrusions and sensor movement strategies in both non-obstructed and obstructed barriers. In particular, we derive the optimal sensor movement strategy to defend non-obstructed barriers, and propose a Dijkstra-like algorithm to generate a sensor movement strategy that performs well in defending obstructed barriers. We verify the correctness of our theoretic analysis by conducting in-depth simulations under various barrier intrusion and sensor movement scenarios.