t, K-Sweep Coverage With Mobile Sensor Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) can connect intelligent agents, sensors, and many other different devices that facilitate our daily works and lives. With the help of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the devices can interact with the environment, which is a significant part in the IoT. Coverage is one of the most challenging issues in WSNs. To utilize mobile sensor nodes to provide periodic coverage, a new type of coverage, named sweep coverage, has been proposed and it attracts a lot of attention. To improve data availability in sweep coverage, we introduce the concept of k-coverage in conventional coverage to sweep coverage and propose t, K-sweep coverage problem in this article, where t is the sweep period constraint to finish the whole coverage process and K is the set of coverage time requirements. To achieve t, K-sweep coverage with the minimum number of mobile sensor nodes, we propose an algorithm named 2-partition sweep coverage (2-PSC) based on a partition of the coverage time requirements and positions. Simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of the number of required mobile sensor nodes.