Coverage Optimization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been used for monitoring of events and environment for a long time. The networks are used in numerous applications such as monitoring of battle fields, traffic, forest firing, tracking of an object and so on. Successful performance of WSNs depends on appropriate coverage of the environment. Coverage has a severe dependence on the infrastructure including the numbers and the places of sensors. So, a substantial step in designing networks is to specify the deployment strategy of nodes. Most of the deployment algorithms have been focused in minimizing network constraints and optimizing sensor coverage in recent years. The purpose of this study is to accommodate the physical form of environments in deployment problem which have not been investigated in previous works. Indeed our goal is to advantage from the ability of GIS in sensors deployment problems in order to make the problem closer to reality. As a result, the Minimax algorithm based on Voronoi diagram is used for optimizing sensor coverage in an urban and a natural area. This method resulted in 12 and 19 percent increase in sensor coverage respectively.