A survey of movement strategies for improving network coverage in wireless sensor networks

The emerging technology of wireless sensor network (WSN) is expected to provide a broad range of applications, such as battlefield surveillance, environmental monitoring, smart spaces and so on. The coverage problem is a fundamental issue in WSN, which mainly concerns with a fundamental question: How well a sensor field is observed by the deployed sensors? To optimize network coverage, the traditional approach is to deploy a large amount of stationary sensor nodes and then to schedule their sensing activities in an efficient way. Recently, mobile sensor nodes have received many attentions since network performance can be greatly improved by using just a few of mobile nodes. We categorize three typical application scenarios of applying mobile nodes, and we then highlight the issues and identify the objectives of optimizing network coverage by leveraging mobile nodes. We further survey recent contributions on the design of nodes’ movement strategy to optimize network coverage in each application scenario.