UAV-aided Weak-Barrier Coverage with Adaptive Sensor Rotation

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is an emerging technology with many applications in surveillance, remote sensing, transportation, scientific research, search and rescue, and many more. In wireless sensor networks, UAVs have been used as mobile sinks and as relay nodes when the network is partitioned. When deploying sensors to monitor large boundaries or borders, sensors are usually dispersed from an aircraft following a predetermined path. In such scenarios sensing gaps are typically unavoidable. In this paper, we consider a wireless network consisting of randomly deployed sensor nodes, directional border nodes, and an UAV. We address the topic of weak-barrier coverage, which detects intruders (or events) moving north-south. We propose a distributed algorithm for weak-barrier coverage, that allows border nodes to dynamically compute their orientation based on notifications from sensor nodes. The UAV is used to monitor barrier gaps and increase the number of intruders detected when crossing the border. We use simulations using MatLab to analyze the performance of our algorithm, and to illustrate the impact of using an UAV in monitoring, when we vary various parameters such as the number of nodes, the view angle of the border nodes, and the event speed.