Finding and Mending Barrier Gaps in Wireless Sensor Networks

Constructing sensing barriers using wireless sensor networks has important applications in military operations and homeland security. The goal of forming a sensing barrier is to detect intruders attempting to cross the network. Early studies often assume that sensors remain static once deployed. We note that barrier gaps may occur at deployment if sensors are deployed at random. Barrier gaps may also occur in an existing barrier if some sensors used to form the barrier start malfunctioning or run out of power. We present an efficient solution to solve this problem. In particular, we devise an efficient algorithm to find sensing gaps and relocate mobile sensors to form a new barrier while balancing the energy consumption among mobile sensors. We also investigate the related design issues and performance tradeoffs. Simulation results show that our algorithms can effectively improve the barrier coverage of a wireless sensor network under a wide range of deployment parameters. These results provide insights and guidelines to the deployment, design, and performance of mobile wireless sensor networks for barrier coverage

Strong barrier coverage of wireless sensor networks

Constructing sensor barriers to detect intruders crossing a randomly-deployed sensor network is an important problem. Early results have shown how to construct sensor barriers to detect intruders moving along restricted crossing paths in rectangular areas. We present a complete solution to this problem for sensors that are distributed according to a Poisson point process. In particular, we present an efficient distributed algorithm to construct sensor barriers on long strip areas of irregular shape without any constraint on crossing paths. Our approach is as follows: We first show that in a rectangular area of width w and length ℓ with w = Ω(log ℓ), if the sensor density reaches a certain value, then there exist, with high probability, multiple disjoint sensor barriers across the entire length of the area such that intruders cannot cross the area undetected. On the other hand, if w = o(log ℓ), then with high probability there is a crossing path not covered by any sensor regardless of the sensor density. We then devise, based on this result, an efficient distributed algorithm to construct multiple disjoint barriers in a large sensor network to cover a long boundary area of an irregular shape. Our algorithm approximates the area by dividing it into horizontal rectangular segments interleaved by vertical thin strips. Each segment and vertical strip independently computes the barriers in its own area. Constructing “horizontal ” barriers in each segment connected by“vertical ” barriers in neighboring vertical strips, we achieve continuous barrier coverage for the whole region. Our approach significantly reduces delay, communication overhead, and computation costs compared to centralized approaches. Finally, we implement our algorithm and carry out a number of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of constructing barrier coverage

Barrier Coverage of Line-Based Deployed Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract — Barrier coverage of wireless sensor networks has been studied intensively in recent years under the assumption that sensors are deployed uniformly at random in a large area (Poisson point process model). However, when sensors are deployed along a line (e.g., sensors are dropped from an aircraft along a given path), they would be distributed along the line with random offsets due to wind and other environmental factors. It is important to study the barrier coverage of such linebased deployment strategy as it represents a more realistic sensor placement model than the Poisson point process model. This paper presents the first set of results in this direction. In particular, we establish a tight lower-bound for the existence of barrier coverage under line-based deployments. Our results show that the barrier coverage of the line-based deployments significantly outperforms that of the Poisson model when the random offsets are relatively small compared to the sensor’s sensing range. We then study sensor deployments along multiple lines and show how barrier coverage is affected by the distance between adjacent lines and the random offsets of sensors. These results demonstrate that sensor deployment strategies have direct impact on the barrier coverage of wireless sensor networks. Different deployment strategies may result in significantly different barrier coverage. Therefore, in the planning and deployment of wireless sensor networks, the coverage goal and possible sensor deployment strategies must be carefully and jointly considered. The results obtained in this paper will provide important guidelines to the deployment and performance of wireless sensor networks for barrier coverage

Barrier Coverage with Sensors of Limited Mobility

Barrier coverage is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks for various battlefield and homeland security applications. The goal is to effectively detect intruders that attempt to penetrate the region of interest. A sensor barrier is formed by a connected sensor cluster across the entire deployed region, acting as a “trip wire ” to detect any crossing intruders. In this paper we study how to efficiently improve barrier coverage using mobile sensors with limited mobility. After the initial deployment, mobile sensors can move to desired locations and connect with other sensors in order to create new barriers. However, simply moving sensors to form a large local cluster does not necessarily yield a global barrier. This global nature of barrier coverage makes it a challenging task to devise effective sensor mobility schemes. Moreover, a good sensor mobility scheme should efficiently improve barrier coverage under the constraints of available mobile sensors and their moving range. We first explore the fundamental limits of sensor mobility on barrier coverage and present a sensor mobility scheme that constructs the maximum number of barriers with minimum sensor moving distance. We then present an efficient algorithm to compute the existence of barrier coverage with sensors of limited mobility, and examine the effects of the number of mobile sensors and their moving ranges on the barrier coverage improvement. Both the analytical results and performance of the algorithms are evaluated via extensive simulations