Optimal algorithm for min-max line barrier coverage with mobile sensors on 2-dimensional plane.

Emerging IoT applications impose line barrier coverage (LBC) tasks with min–max movement objective due to requirements of energy balance, fairness, etc. In LBC, we are given a line barrier and a set of n sensors distributed on the plane. The aim is to move the sensors to fully cover the given barrier, such that the maximum movement of the mobile sensors is minimized and hence the energy consumption of the sensors are balanced. This paper proposes an exact algorithm to optimally solve LBC, which deserves a runtime On2 compared favorably to the previous state-of-art runtime On2logn. The key idea of the improvement is acceleration-via-approximation: devise a novel approximation algorithm and then use it to accelerate the calculation of optimum solutions. Extensive numerical experiments were carried out to evaluate the practical performance of our algorithm against other baselines, demonstrating its performance gain over the previous state-of-art algorithms.