Utilizing active sensor nodes in smart environments for optimal communication coverage

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are widely used in smart environments to capture and detect the activities of human beings, and achieving reliable transmission between sensor nodes has become one of the main challenges of practical applications. This paper presents a scheme for path planning that is designed to achieve optimal coverage by using active nodes to periodically fill in the blank areas and to replace the failed nodes. This approach can effectively avoid uneven energy consumption while maintaining complete link states. Meanwhile, the curl field of the nodes is used to model the effects of the residual energy and the distance between nodes, thereby effectively relaxing the requirements on the spatial positions of the nodes. Experiments show that in the case of directional transmission, the proposed method demonstrates better performance than other algorithms in terms of the network lifecycle, coverage, and transmission reliability. This method can effectively address the problem of cross-node failure along the transmission paths in complex and dynamic networks.