Optimal Mobile Sensor Scheduling for a Guaranteed Coverage Ratio in Hybrid Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes an optimal mobile sensor-scheduling algorithm for recovering the failure sensors in hybrid wireless sensor networks (WSNs). To maintain a guaranteed coverage over the area of interest, spare mobile sensors in WSNs will be activated to replace the failure sensors. The optimal scheduling problem is formulated into two optimization problems, one of which precisely determines the minimum value of the largest distance required to travel for mobile sensors, while the other one gives the optimal dispatch for mobile sensors to minimize the total travel distance. Furthermore, a distributed suboptimal scheduling, which only requires the local matching information of mobile sensors, is developed as well. Both regular and random network topologies are provided to illustrate the proposed algorithms in the simulation. © 2013 Zhixin Fu and Keyou You.