Coverage Hole Repair in WSNs Using Cascaded Neighbor Intervention
Banafsj Khalifa, Zaher Al Aghbari, Ahmed M. Khedr, Jemal Abawajy · IEEE Sensors Journal · 2017
Sufficient coverage of the sensing field is critical for many applications in wireless sensor networks. However, the network can experience coverage holes when one or more sensor nodes stop functioning due to energy depletion or physical damage. This impairs network connectivity and impedes performance. Therefore, it is imperative to automatically repair the coverage hole as it occurs. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm called neighbor intervention by farthest point that repairs coverage holes using mobile sensor nodes in the immediate vicinity. Participating nodes collaborate to approximate the area of the hole, then consider their coverage redundancy, residual energy, and moving distance to select a suitable replacement to cover it. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by simulation. We compared the performance of the proposed algorithm with several baseline approaches using extensive simulations. The results show that the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms the baseline algorithms.