Towards improving barrier coverage using mobile robots

Barrier coverage is an important technology in military surveillance applications. The goal of forming a sensing barrier is to detect intruders attempting to cross the network. In a randomly deployed network (e.g., from the artillery or the aircraft), barrier breaks can appear at random frequency and random positions. However, if the positions of the nodes can be presented in the context of probability distribution, useful regularities can be extracted. By using a developed Java-based simulator, an investigation on the influence of the deployment accuracy, sensing radius and network density on the frequency and the view of the barrier breaks is conducted. Two algorithms (with two different criterions) that differently chose the nodes to incorporate into the sensor barriers are proposed. The simulations quantify the density, the number of barrier breaks and the number of additionally needed mobile nodes in order for at least one barrier coverage to be provided. The results on the structure of the created barriers and breaks provide guidelines to the design of the barrier coverage in randomly deployed hybrid wireless sensor networks (WSNs).