Arbitrary obstacles constrained full coverage in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Coverage is critical for wireless sensor networks to monitor a region of interest and to provide a good quality of service. In many application scenarios, full coverage is required, which means every point inside the region (excluding the obstacles) must be covered by at least one sensor. The problem of using the minimum number of sensors to achieve full coverage for an arbitrary region with obstacles is NP-hard. Most existing coverage methods, such as contour-based ones, simply place sensors along the boundaries to cover the holes that are near the obstacles and the region boundary. These methods are inefficient especially when the obstacles or the region are irregular. In this paper, based on computational geometry, we design a full coverage method, which accurately finds the uncovered holes and places sensors efficiently for both the regular and irregular obstacles and regions. Specifically, we show that the more irregular the obstacles and the region are, the more sensors our method can save. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.