Exploratory Coverage in Limited Mobility Sensor Networks

Autonomous drones are employed with ever increasing frequency in applications ranging from search and rescue, detection of forest fires, and battlefield/ civilian surveillance. In this paper, we study the effects of limited mobility in such mobile sensor platforms, from the perspective of the effect limited mobility has on coverage effectiveness. We define a problem that we call Exploratory Coverage in Limited Mobility Sensor Networks, wherein the objective is to move a number of mobile sensors to fully explore (and hence, sense every point in) a target area in order to detect any critical event that has already occurred in the area. Further, we provide a taxonomy of problems within exploratory coverage as identified by the relationships between sensor range, coverage area, number of sensors, and mobility (range). We then design a purely localized and distributed approximation algorithm for our problem, and provide simulation results to demonstrate the effects of limited mobility on exploratory coverage.