A Decentralized Hole-Shape Regulation Technique for Enhancing Patrol and Deployment Tasks in Mobile WSNs

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a hole is formed due to the non-uniform deployment, nodes failure, and some natural phenomena such as animals´ residence or fierce wind making sensor nodes broken. The existence of a hole reduces both the accuracy of data collection and the efficiency of communications. Recently, many studies proposed mechanisms to detach a robot that loads with static sensors to heal the hole and maintain the spatial full coverage. Some other studies utilized mobile sensors to patrol the hole, maintaining the temporal full coverage. However, an irregular hole results in the redeployment and patrolling tasks inefficiency. This protocol proposes a novel mechanism, called HONOR, to normalize an irregular hole in a mobile WSN. Mobile sensors that detect the hole cooperate with each other to regularize the irregular hole in a distributed manner. As a result, the efficiency of robot´s redeployment and the mobile sensors´ patrol are significantly improved. Simulation results reveal that HONOR efficiently regularizes the hole shape and therefore saves energy consumption and delay time required for the robot´s redeployment and the mobile sensors´ patrol.