Confident Information Coverage Hole Healing in Hybrid Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

The emergence of coverage holes will dramatically degrade the quality of service of the industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). Based on the novel confident information coverage (CIC) model, this work focuses on how to heal the CIC holes in hybrid IWSNs containing both static nodes and mobile nodes. We pinpoint the CIC hole healing (CICHH) problem with the goal of selecting and dispatching some randomly scattered mobile nodes to the CIC holes detected by the stationary nodes such that the CIC holes can be repaired and the CIC performance can be satisfied, and prove its NP-completeness. For handling the CICHH problem, we devise two energy-efficient heuristic solutions including a centralized CICHH algorithm and a distributed one. Both the proposed schemes aim at efficiently healing the CIC holes while minimizing the total moving energy consumption of the dispatched mobile nodes, or maximizing the mobile nodes' average remaining energy after movement, or minimizing the maximum mobile energy consumption of each dispatched mobile node. Experimental simulation results show the proposed schemes can energy-efficiently heal the CIC holes and outperform three peer algorithms in terms of energy efficiency and coverage ratio.