Estimating coverage holes and enhancing coverage in mixed sensor networks

Area coverage is one of the most fundamental problems in ad hoc wireless sensor networks because it directly relates to optimization of resources in a sensing field. Maximizing the coverage area while maintaining a lower cost of deployment has always been a challenge, especially when the monitoring region is unknown and possibly hazardous. In this paper, we present a method to deterministically estimate the exact amount of coverage holes under random deployment using Voronoi diagrams and use the static nodes to collaborate and estimate the number of additional mobile nodes needed to be deployed and relocated to optimal positions to maximize coverage. We follow a two-step deployment process in a mixed sensor network and we argue by simulation and analysis that our collaborative coverage enhancing algorithm (COVEN) can achieve a tradeoff between the cost of deployment and percentage of area covered.