An Efficient Multilevel Coverage Scheme in Mobile Sensor Networks

We focus on the coverage problem in the mobile sensor network, where each node is capable of movement. Most of the prior schemes pursue coverage by uniformizing the node density or internodal distance over the area of interest. In this paper, we first argue that the uniformizing schemes are inefficient to achieve the multi-level coverage due to the phenomenon we call geometric anomaly, and that the anomaly can be solved by layering. Then, we design a distributed layering scheme, where the layers are built by nodes´ local decision and the imbalance of the layer size is minimized by regrouping. Simulation results show that our scheme achieves the required multilevel coverage with a significantly reduced number of nodes.