Robots-Assisted Redeployment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Connectivity and coverage are two crucial problems for wireless sensor networks. Several studies have focused on proposing solutions for improving and adjusting the initial deployment of a wireless sensor network to meet these two criteria. In our work, we propose a new hierarchical architecture for sensor networks that facilitates the gathering of redundancy information of the topology. Several mobile robots must then relocate, in an optimized way, redundant sensors to achieve optimal connectivity and coverage of the network. Mobile robots have to cooperate and coordinate their movement. A performance evaluation is conducted to study the trade-off between the number of required robots and its impact on the rate of network connectivity and coverage.