Hybrid movement strategy in self-orienting directional sensor networks

The coverage problem in directional sensor networks (DSNs) introduces new challenges especially for randomly deployed networks. As many overlapped regions and coverage holes might occur after the initial deployment, self-orientation of the nodes is a necessity for randomly deployed DSNs. There exist two main approaches for the self-orientation of directional sensor nodes in DSNs [1], motility and mobility. Motility refers to the adjustment of the working direction of the nodes, whereas mobility describes the physical movement of the nodes. Most existing studies propose solutions based on the motility capability of the directional sensor nodes. On the other hand, mobility is a powerful feature offering great flexibility. Nevertheless, the high energy consumption of mobility discourages researchers to utilize this approach in their solutions. In this study, we propose a novel approach, a hybrid movement strategy (HMS), where we exploit motility/mobility in a cascaded manner for the coverage improvement in DSNs. The HMS improves the initial coverage up to 47% and achieves up to 7% more coverage than the motility only solution. Besides, it has provided at least 40% energy-saving compared to the mobility only solution in our scenarios.