Abstract
Conference Title: 2016 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC) Conference Start Date: 2016, Sept. 5 Conference End Date: 2016, Sept. 9 Conference Location: Paphos, Cyprus This paper studies the problem of scheduling sensors for target coverage in a surveillance environment. In this problem, coverage of target areas must be guaranteed during the system timeframe. First, we formulate an independent scheduler of sensors, where scheduling at each time epoch is independent from the sensing patterns among all sensors during the timeframe. Then, we formulate a cooperative scheduler, where each sensor has a potential sensing pattern that is shared with other sensors. We use the number of sensing times (i.e., actual activation times for sensors) as a performance metric. We show by simulations that the cooperative sensor scheduler significantly reduces the number of sensing times compared to the independent scheduler. Furthermore, we combine the concept of cooperative scheduling of surveillance systems with mobile sensors, and we study the performance metric of the independent and cooperative schedulers. We use a realistic coverage model to describe the physical availability of mobile sensors for covering target areas. We find that using mobile sensors significantly reduces the number of sensing times compared to using only fixed sensors.