CFPP: Collision-free Path Planning for Wireless Mobile Sensors Deployment

With the growing popularity of wireless mobile sensors, automated sensors deployment in a smart sensing environment has become practical and feasible. Once the deployment algorithm determines moving destinations (goals) for all sensors, however, the problem of how to schedule collision-free moving paths to reach the goals safely remains largely unaddressed in the wireless sensor networking (WSN) literature. In this paper, we propose a collision-free path planning (CFPP) mechanism, based on geometric formulations and batched movements, to address the sensors deployment problem. Our proposed CFPP mechanism ensures 100% sensors goal reachability, which is critical for most WSN monitoring applications that require sufficient sensing coverage to operate correctly. Performance results show that our CFPP outperforms other existing path-planning mechanisms in terms of computation latency, energy consumption, and sensors reachability (goals reaching success probability).