Distributed Voronoi-Based Self-Redeployment for Coverage Enhancement in a Mobile Directional Sensor Network

A directional sensor network is different from conventional wireless sensor networks. It uses directional sensors instead of omnidirectional ones in the network for different applications, and the effective sensing range is characterized by directionality and size-specific sensing angle. Therefore, conditions of directional sensor networks are dissimilar to those of generic wireless sensor networks for researches, especially on the sensing coverage. This study proposed a distributed approach to enhance the overall field coverage by utilizing mobile and direction-rotatable sensors in a directional sensor network. The algorithm makes sensors self-redeploy to the new location and new direction without global information by utilizing the features of geometrical Voronoi cells. Simulations were used to evaluate and prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The results show that the approach contributes to significant field coverage improvement in directional sensor networks.