Barrier Coverage Deployment Algorithms for Mobile Sensor Networks

Barrier coverage is one of the most important issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and it has been a popular area of WSN research in recent years. Maximizing the number of barrier paths is one of the key factors in the design of barrier coverage algorithms for WSNs. This study proposes a novel concept to optimize the number of barrier paths by minimizing the total moving distance and the number of moving sensor nodes or sensors using two algorithms. After an initial random placement of the sensors, the first approach applies a heuristic method to move all sensors close to the optimal location to maximize the total number of barrier paths. The second approach is used to determine the barrier paths based on a coverage graph and then fill up the barrier gaps by moving the other sensors that do not belong to any available barrier path. The simulation results show that our two proposed algorithms exhibit improved barrier coverage. The results also demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms when compared with other competitive approaches, such as CBarrier and BCLD. The first approach is more suitable for a high degree of fault-tolerant coverage, while the second approach can achieve the optimal number of moving sensors and total moving distance.