Sensor Network Coverage Problem: A Hypergraph Model Approach

Abstract

A sensor power schedule for a homogenous network of sensors with a limited battery capacity monitoring a set of points of interest (POI) depends on locations of POIs and sensors, monitoring range and battery lifetimes. A good schedule keeps the network operational as long as possible while maintaining the required level of coverage (not all POIs have to be monitored all the time). Searching for such a schedule is known as the Maximum Lifetime Coverage Problem. A new approach solving MLCP is proposed in this paper. First, in every time step, we try to achieve the required coverage level using sensors with the longest remaining working time monitoring the largest number of POIs that have not been covered yet. The resulting schedule is next used for generating a neighbour schedule by a perturbation algorithm. For experimental evaluation of our approach a new set of test cases is proposed. Experiments with these data show interesting properties of the algorithm.