VirFID: A Virtual Force (VF)-based Interest-Driven moving phenomenon monitoring scheme using multiple mobile sensor nodes

In this paper, we study mobile sensor network (MSN) architectures and algorithms for monitoring a moving phenomenon in an unknown and open area using a group of autonomous mobile sensor (MS) nodes. Monitoring a moving phenomenon involves challenges due to limited communication/sensing ranges of MS nodes, the phenomenon's unpredictable changes in distribution and position, and the lack of information on the sensing area. To address the challenges and meet the objective of the maximization of weighted sensing coverage, we propose a novel scheme, namely VirFID (Virtual Force (VF)-based Interest-Driven moving phenomenon monitoring). In VirFID, MS nodes move toward the positions where more interesting sensing data can be obtained by utilizing the virtual force, which is calculated based on the distance between MS nodes and sensed values in the area of interest. MS nodes also perform network-wise information sharing to increase the weighted sensing coverage. Depending on the level of information used, three variants of VirFID are evaluated: VirFID-LIB (Local Information-Based), VirFID-GHL (Global Highest and Lowest), and VirFID-IBN (Interests at Boundary Nodes). In addition, an analytical model for estimating MSN speed is designed. Simulations are performed to compare the performance of three VirFID variants with other approaches. Our simulation results show that VirFID algorithms outperform other schemes in terms of the weighted coverage efficiency, and VirFID-IBN achieves the highest weighted coverage efficiency among VirFID variants.