Healing Coverage Holes for Big Data Collection in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

The quality of service is severely degraded by coverage holes in wireless sensor networks. This paper focuses on the coverage hole healing (CHH) problem for big data collection in a large-scale wireless sensor network (LS-WSN) where the LS-WSN containing both static sensors and mobile sensors with the topology control of LEACH algorithm. Meanwhile, the data volume transmitted by each sensor node may be inconsistent. Specifically, the target of the CHH problem is to find an optimal subset of mobile nodes from all mobile nodes while maximizing the transmission times (TT) that all dispatched mobile nodes can transmit in their lifetime. Hence, from the data-centric perspective, we propose a greedy healing algorithm (GHA) via the greedy-based heuristic strategy with low computational complexity to solve this CHH problem. Simulation results show that the proposed GHA can efficiently heal the coverage holes which significantly prolongs the network lifetime and observably enhances the quality of service (QoS) of WSNs while increasing the TT, transmitted data volume (TDV) and average residual energy of all dispatched mobile nodes.