A distributed self‐organising node deployment algorithm for mobile sensor networks

Abstract

Summary Providing the appropriate coverage is quite essential for the effective functioning of many applications in Wireless Sensor Networks. Therefore, the efficiency of node deployment algorithms to supply the requested coverage is of high significance. In this paper, inspired by the equilibrium of molecules, a novel node deployment algorithm, called Smart Self‐organising Node Deployment (SSND), is proposed to provide maximum coverage. Despite other proposed algorithms, which provide coverage based on the collective movement of nodes with massive energy consumption, SSND moves one sensor in every neighbourhood at each step to reduce the sensor nodes' movement and hence the energy consumption. The chosen sensor nodes at each time step are distributedly determined by an eligibility function to reduce the non‐essential movements while improving the accuracy of the reported locations of neighbours. Our extensive simulation study shows that SSND can achieve up to 30% coverage improvement compared to those of other algorithms in most scenarios and provides an adequate trade‐off between coverage and energy consumption.