Dynamic Networked Coverage of Time-Varying Environments in the Presence of Fading Communication Channels

In this article, we study the problem of dynamic coverage of a set of points of interest (POIs) in a time-varying environment. We consider the scenario where a physical quantity is constantly growing at certain rates at the POIs. A number of mobile agents are then deployed to periodically cover (sense or service) the POIs and keep the physical quantity under control bounded at all the POIs. We assume a communication-constrained operation, where the mobile agents need to communicate to a fixed remote station over realistic wireless links to complete their coverage task. We then propose novel mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs) to design periodic trajectories and TX power policies for the mobile agents that minimize the total energy (the summation of motion and communication energy) consumption of the mobile agents in each period, while (1) guaranteeing the boundedness of the quantity of interest at all the POIs, and (2) meeting the constraints on the connectivity of the mobile agents, the frequency of covering the POIs, and the total energy budget of the mobile agents. We furthermore provide a probabilistic analysis of the problem. Our results show the superior performance of the proposed framework for dynamic coverage in realistic fading environments.