MobiBar: Barrier Coverage with Mobile Sensors

Critical homeland security applications such as monitoring zones contaminated by chemical or biological attacks and monitoring the spread of forest fires, require the timely creation of barrier of sensors along the border to be monitored. The strict time requirements and the hazardous nature of these contexts impede manual sensor positioning. Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks have the potential to meet the desired coverage requirements, by exploiting the device locomotion capabilities. In this paper we propose MOBIBAR, a distributed and asynchronous algorithm for k-barrier coverage with mobile sensors. We formally prove that MOBIBAR terminates in a finite time and that the final deployment provides the maximum level of barrier coverage with the available sensors. We compare MOBIBAR to a recent virtual force-based approach by means of simulations, which show the superiority of our solution. Furthermore, we show the self-healing capability of MOBIBAR to quickly recover from sudden sensor faults.