Cheap: An efficient localized area coverage maintenance protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Over the course of operation, a wireless sensor network can experience failures that are detrimental to the underlying application's objectives. In this paper, we address the problem of restoring coverage ratio of a damaged area (hole) using only the neighboring nodes. Most existing solutions fail to simultaneously prevent new holes formation, collisions, oscillations, cascaded movements, and overlapped areas. To do this, we propose an intersection points-based strategy to properly locate and characterize any type of coverage hole. Then, we allow nodes, whether or not redundant, to coordinate their movements and ranges in order to effectively eliminate the detected hole. We suggest for that purpose, a tabu search based optimization scheme along with a location-allocation model through a mixed integer linear program. Simulation results show that our protocol significantly increases the network's resilience.