Self-Organized Node Placement for Area Coverage in Pervasive Computing Networks

In pervasive computing environments, it is often required to cover a certain service area by a given deployment of nodes or access points. In case of large inaccessible areas, often the node deployment is random. In this paper, given a random uniform node distribution over a 2-D region, we propose a simple distributed solution for self-organized node placement to satisfy coverage of the given region of interest using least number of active nodes. We assume that the nodes are identical and each of them covers a circular area. To ensure coverage we tessellate the area with regular hexagons, and attempt to place a node at each vertex and the center of each hexagon termed as target points. By the proposed distributed algorithm, unique nodes are selected to fill up the target points mutually exclusively with limited displacement. Analysis and simulation studies show that proposed algorithm with less neighborhood information and simpler computation solves the coverage problem using minimum number of active nodes, and with minimum displacement in 95 % cases. Also, the process terminates in constant number of rounds only.