An Energy-Efficient Self-Deployment Scheme in Intelligent Mobile Sensor Networks

In traditional static wireless sensor networks, it is sometimes impossible to deploy the sensors manually when they are distributed in unexploited, hostile, or disaster areas. If each sensor has the locomotion capability, it can re-deploy itself using the location information of neighbor sensors. In our previous study, we showed that moving sensors to the centroids of their Voronoi polygon generated by the location information of neighbor sensors is efficient for expanding the coverage area. In this paper, we present an improved potential-field-based selfdeployment scheme to utilize the attractive force generated from the centroid of a sensor´s local Voronoi polygon as well as the repulsive force usually used in the traditional potential-fieldbased scheme. Simulation results show that our scheme can achieve higher coverage and less movement in shorter time than the traditional potential-field-based scheme.