Optimizing K-coverage of mobile WSNs

Abstract Recently, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used for monitoring and tracking applications. Sensor mobility adds extra flexibility and greatly expands the application space. Due to the limited energy and battery lifetime for each sensor, it can remain active only for a limited amount of time. To avoid the drawbacks of the classical coverage model, especially if a sensor died, K -coverage model requires at least k sensor nodes monitor any target to consider it covered. This paper proposed a new model that uses the Genetic Algorithm (GA) to optimize the coverage requirements in WSNs to provide continuous monitoring of specified targets for longest possible time with limited energy resources. Moreover, we allow sensor nodes to move to appropriate positions to collect environmental information. Our model is based on the continuous and variable speed movement of mobile sensors to keep all targets under their cover all times. To further prove that our proposed model is better than other related work, a set of experiments in different working environments and a comparison with the most related work are conducted. The improvement that our proposed method achieved regarding the network lifetime was in a range of 26%–41.3% using stationary nodes while it was in a range of 29.3%–45.7% using mobile nodes. In addition, the network throughput is improved in a range of 13%–17.6%. Moreover, the running time to form the network structure and switch between nodes’ modes is reduced by 12%.