Consider @math sensors placed randomly and independently with the uniform distribution in a @math dimensional unit cube ( @math ). The sensors have identical sensing range equal to @math , for some @math . We are interested in moving the sensors from their initial positions to new positions so as to ensure that the @math dimensional unit cube is completely covered, i.e., every point in the @math dimensional cube is within the range of a sensor. If the @math -th sensor is displaced a distance @math , what is a displacement of minimum cost? As cost measure for the displacement of the team of sensors we consider the @math -total movement defined as the sum @math , for some constant @math . We assume that @math and @math are chosen so as to allow full coverage of the @math dimensional unit cube and @math . The main contribution of the paper is to show the existence of a tradeoff between the @math dimensional cube, sensing radius and @math -total movement. The main results can be summarized as follows for the case of the @math dimensional cube. If the @math dimensional cube sensing radius is @math and @math , for some @math , then we present an algorithm that uses @math total expected movement (see Algorithm 2 and Theorem 5). If the @math dimensional cube sensing radius is greater than @math and @math is a natural number then the total expected movement is @math (see Algorithm 3 and Theorem 7). In addition, we simulate Algorithm 2 and discuss the results of our simulations.
Consider @math mobile sensors placed independently at random with the uniform distribution on a barrier represented as the unit line segment @math . The sensors have identical sensing radius, say @math . When a sensor is displaced on the line a distance equal to @math it consumes energy (in movement) which is proportional to some (fixed) power @math of the distance @math traveled. The energy consumption of a system of @math sensors thus displaced is defined as the sum of the energy consumptions for the displacement of the individual sensors. We focus on the problem of energy efficient displacement of the sensors so that in their final placement the sensor system ensures coverage of the barrier and the energy consumed for the displacement of the sensors to these final positions is minimized in expectation. In particular, we analyze the problem of displacing the sensors from their initial positions so as to attain coverage of the unit interval and derive trade-offs for this displacement as a function of the sensor range. We obtain several tight bounds in this setting thus generalizing several of the results of [10] to any power @math .