Energy-Efficient Probabilistic Full Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

It is a common class of applications with wireless sensor network to provide full coverage to the region of interest (ROI), such as environment monitoring, military detection and agricultural observation. Existing literatures on full coverage are mostly based on the binary sensing model to simplify the problem. However, the results are far from the reality since binary sensing model as a coarse approximation is too conservative. The probabilistic sensing model has been proposed as a more realistic model to characterize the sensing region. In this paper, we introduce the concept of ε-full coverage based on probabilistic model, i.e., every point in ROI has at least a probability ε of being covered by sensors. We explore the mathematic relationship between the probabilities of two adjacent points being covered and transform ε-full coverage problem into point coverage problem. Then, we design ε-full coverage optimization (FCO) to select a subset of sensors to provide ε-full coverage dynamically so that the lifetime of network is prolonged. This algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art solution significantly, which we have validated by simulations