Covering a 3D flat surface with autonomous and mobile wireless sensor nodes

International audienceWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used in a wide range of applications due to their monitoring and tracking abilities. Depending on the applications goals, sensor nodes are deployed either in a two dimensional (2D) area or in a three-dimensional (3D) area. In addition, WSN deployment can be either in a distributed or a centralized manner. In this paper, we are interested in a fully distributed deployment of WSN in several 3D-flat-surface configurations using autonomous and mobile nodes. Our goal is to ensure full 3D flat surfaces coverage and maintain network connectivity for these surfaces. To reach our goal we propose 3D-DVFA-FSC, a distributed deployment algorithm based on virtual forces strategy to move sensor nodes over different 3D-flat-surface shapes. Simulation results show that 3D-DVFA-FSC provides a full coverage rate regardless of the 3D-flat-surface configuration while maintaining network connectivity

Distributed coverage and connectivity in three dimensional wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates coverage and connectivity issues for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) under three dimensional deployment scenarios. WSNs are deployed over a region to sense the events of interest in a geographical area and transmit collected data to a Base Station (BS). We exploit the inherent redundancy in WSN deployment by finding an optimal set of sensor nodes that can cover the 3D deployment region efficiently while maintaining the network connectivity. In this regard we propose a distributed coverage algorithm (DCA) that allows sensor nodes to form a 1-covered topology by exchanging messages based on the local information. We also present an analytical relation that is used to estimate the sensing range used by the DCA. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme