Data Ferry Trajectory Planning for Sweep Coverage Problem with Multiple Mobile Sensors

Sweep coverage plays an important role in many applications like data gathering, sensing coverage, and devices control, etc. In this paper, we deal with sweep coverage problem with multiple mobile sensors to periodically cover n targets in the surveillance region. We propose three constant-factor approximations, namely CycleSplit, CoCycle, and AugPrim, to minimize the longest trajectory length of mobile sensors under different scenarios respectively. CycleSplit deals with non-cooperative sweep coverage problem (NCSC), in which each mobile sensor works independently along different trajectory cycle. It has an approximation ratio of (5 -
²
/
_n-m+1
), which improves the best known approximation ratio of 5. CoCycle solves the cooperative sweep coverage problem (CSC), in which multiple sensors work together to cover n targets. Its approximation ratio is 4, which outperforms the state-of-art best approximation ratio of 6. AugPrim is also a 6-approximation. It computes the sensor route for multi-sink sweep coverage problem (MSSC), where each sensor has to transmit the gathered data to one of the given sinks in each detection period. It implements the modified Prim algorithm and augment paths in turn according to the sink positions. AugPrim is the first approximation for sweep coverage problem with sinks. Finally, we provide various numerical experiments and comparisons with several previous work to validate the efficiency of our design.