Minimal Patching Barrier Healing Strategy for barrier coverage in hybrid WSNs

Barrier coverage is a critical issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for various battlefield and homeland security applications. In this paper, we address the problem of how to efficiently heal coverage holes in hybrid Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) by relocating mobile nodes, and propose a hole recovery strategy called Minimal Patching Barrier Healing Strategy (MPBHS). In our strategy, a definition of Minimal Patching Barrier (MPB) is proposed, which can be healed by least number of nodes. Under this definition, our strategy can be divided into two steps: first is finding out the MPB among all possible barriers; second is dispatching the selected mobile nodes, which means moving mobile nodes to appropriate points in MPB to heal coverage holes, according to our Coverage Holes-Mobile Nodes Matching (CHNM). The experimental evaluation shows the efficiency of our proposed strategy with the respect of both sensor nodes´ efficiency and low energy efficiency.