An Incremental Self-Deployment Algorithm for Mobile Sensor Networks

This paper describes an incremental deployment algorithm for mobile sensor networks. A mobile sensor network is a distributed collection of nodes, each of which has sensing, computation, communication and locomotion capabilities. The algorithm described in this paper will deploy such nodes one-at-a-time into an unknown environment, with each node making use of information gathered by previously deployed nodes to determine its deployment location. The algorithm is designed to maximize network ‘coverage’ while simultaneously ensuring that nodes retain line-of-sight relationships with one another. This latter constraint arises from the need to localize the nodes in an unknown environment: in our previous work on team localization (A. Howard, M.J. Matarić, and G.S. Sukhatme, in Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, EPFL, Switzerland, 2002; IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2002) we have shown how nodes can localize themselves by using other nodes as landmarks. This paper describes the incremental deployment algorithm and presents the results from an extensive series of simulation experiments. These experiments serve to both validate the algorithm and illuminate its empirical properties.