Mobility-assisted minimum connected cover in a wireless sensor network

All properties of mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) are inherited from static wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and meanwhile have their own uniqueness and node mobility. Sensor nodes in these networks monitor different regions of an area of interest and collectively present a global overview of monitored activities. Since failure of a sensor node leads to loss of connectivity, it may cause a partitioning of the network. Adding mobility to WSNs can significantly increase the capability of the WSN by making it resilient to failures, reactive to events, and able to support disparate missions with a common set of sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm based on the divide-and-conquer approach, in which the whole region is divided into sub-regions and in each sub-region the minimum connected sensor cover set is selected through energy-aware selection method. Also, we propose a new technique for mobility assisted minimum connected sensor cover considering the network energy. We provide performance metrics to analyze the performance of our approach and the simulation results clearly indicate the benefits of our new approach in terms of energy consumption, communication complexity, and number of active nodes over existing algorithms.