Node Placement and Path Planning for Improved Area Coverage in Mixed Wireless Sensor Networks

For the large-scale monitoring of a physical phenomena using a wireless sensor network (WSN), a large number of static and/or mobile sensor nodes are required, resulting in higher deployment cost. In this work, we develop an efficient algorithm that can employ a small number of static nodes together with a set of mobile nodes for improved area coverage. An efficient deployment of static nodes and guided mobility of the mobile nodes is critical for maximizing the area coverage. To this end, we propose three mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulations. The first formulation efficiently deploys a set of static nodes and the other two formulations plan the path of a set of mobile nodes so as to maximize the area coverage and minimize the total number of movements required to achieve the desired coverage. We present extensive performance evaluation of the proposed algorithms and their comparison with benchmark approaches. The simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithms for different network area and number of static and mobile nodes.