Multi-Robot Sensor Relocation to Enhance Connectivity in a WSN

Ensuring connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is a challenging issue, especially in hazardous areas (like battlefield). Many applications of WSN require an important level of connectivity in the network to detect a given event (like detection Intrusion) and forward it to the ”sink” node in order to alert users. For these risky areas the deterministic deployment is not usually guaranteed and the network is composed by a set of disconnected Islands. We present in our work two strategies to relocate sensors in order to improve the connectivity using mobile Robots. These two solutions are called Multi-Robot Island-based Relocation (MRIBR) and Multi-Robot Grid-Based Island-based Relocation (MRGIR). Through several simulations, we show that MRGIR outperforms MRIBR. Our study can be used especially to make a tradeoff between the number of deployed sensors and the numbers of the used mobile robots, according to the quality needed for the application