Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks
Jie Wu, Mihaela Cardei · 2004
Recent improvements in affordable and efficient integrated electronic devices have a considerable impact on advancing the state of wireless sensor networks, which constitute the platform of a broad range of applications related to national security, surveillance, military, health care, and environmental monitoring. An important problem receiving increased consideration recently is the sensor coverage problem, centered around a fundamental question: How well do the sensors observe the physical space? The coverage concept is subject to a wide range of interpretations due to a variety of sensors and applications. Different coverage formulations have been proposed, based on the subject to be covered (area versus discrete points), sensor deployment mechanism (random versus deterministic) as well as other wireless sensor network properties (e.g. network connectivity and minimum energy consumption). In this article, we survey recent contributions addressing coverage problems in the context of static wireless sensor networks. We present various coverage formulations and their assumptions, as well as an overview of the solutions proposed.