Weak-barrier coverage with adaptive sensor rotation

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in environment, climate, animal monitoring, surveillance, and also in the medical field. When deploying sensors to monitor boundaries of battlefields or country borders, sensors are usually dispersed from an aircraft following a predetermined path. In such scenarios sensing gaps are usually unavoidable. We consider a wireless network consisting of randomly deployed sensor nodes and directional border nodes deployed using a random line-based deployment model. In this paper we propose an adaptive distributed algorithm for weak-barrier coverage that allows border nodes to dynamically compute their orientation based on notifications from the sensor nodes, such that to increase the number of intruders detected by the border nodes. We use simulations to analyze the performance of our algorithm and to compare it with a non-adaptive gap mending algorithm.