Impasse-Aware Node Placement Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensor deployment is an important issue in which sensors are deployed in a specific monitoring region using low-cost hardware but achieving high coverage quality. In recent years, several mechanisms have been developed for the efficient robotic deployment of sensors. Their performance levels are highly dependent on unknown obstacles that can give rise to the dead-end problem. A key challenge when developing a robot deployment mechanism is to overcome the dead-end problem and deliver full coverage with a minimal number of sensors. This paper proposes an impasse-aware robot deployment (IAD) algorithm. The proposed IAD mainly consists of basic deployment rules and dead-end handling rules. The basic deployment rules are intended to achieve full coverage with a minimal number of sensors; the proposed dead-end handling rules can efficiently resolve the dead-end problem. Extensive experimental studies have demonstrated that our proposed IAD achieves superior performance to that of existing robot deployment mechanisms with respect to coverage ratio, energy efficiency, deployment path length, and required stack space.