On Timely Sweep Coverage With Multiple Mobile Nodes

Sweep coverage uses mobile nodes for monitoring Points of Interests (PoIs) in a sensing field. With sweep coverage, information can be effectively gathered without using a lot of static sensors. In this paper, we study the sweep coverage problem with sensing and transmission delay constraints, which is regarded as the Timely Sweep Coverage problem. Specifically, we investigate how to use the minimum number of mobile nodes to cover all PoIs under the two delay constraints. We propose two heuristic algorithms, MR-MinExpand and CoTSweep, to provide timely sweep coverage under different scenarios. MR-MinExpand leverages the difference between sensing and transmission delay constraints to schedule the route for each mobile node. CoTSweep considers the scenario where some PoIs cannot be covered by a single mobile node, and leverages the collaboration between mobile nodes to enable the sink node to collect data from remote PoIs. Extensive simulations and comparisons with previous works are conducted to validate the advantages of our algorithms.