Path Planning for Maximizing Area Coverage of Mobile Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

A sensor network consists of tiny, low-powered and multi-functional sensor devices, which can be used to detect and monitor various conditions in the neighborhood of the devices. Regions of the sensing area that are not within the sensing range of any sensor node constitute `coverage holes.' Collecting data from such areas is one of the primary uses of mobile nodes. The path taken by the mobile node(s) can have a significant impact on the performance of the network, regarding the achieved coverage of the sensing area. In this paper, we propose using guided mobility to allow mobile nodes to visit as many coverage holes as possible, within a given time frame. We present a new mixed integer linear program (MILP) formulation that calculates the optimal path to be taken by the mobile node, to maximize the combined total area covered the static and mobile nodes. Simulations with different network sizes and sensing and movement capabilities of the nodes are used to evaluate the proposed MILP.