Automatic Barrier Coverage Formation with Mobile Sensor Networks

In sensor networks many efforts have been made on barrier coverage. Most of them rely on the assumption that sensors are randomly or manually deployed around the region of interest. It is obvious that the random deployment wastes many redundant sensors without contribution on the barrier formation. Moreover, in most real scenarios, it is difficult to deploy sensors manually due to the region usually in large scale or in danger. Hence, this paper studies the problem that using mobile sensors to form barrier surrounding the region automatically. The fundamental objective is to take full advantage of the limited number of mobile sensors to form the barrier coverage with the highest detection capability. The challenge is that the sensors only have local information. A fully distributed algorithm based on virtual force and convex analysis is developed for the objective to relocate the sensors from the original positions to uniformly distribute on the convex hull of the region. Simulation results verify the validity of our proposed cooperative scheme.