Barrier coverage using sensors with offsets

Abstract

One of the most fundamental tasks of wireless sensor networks is to provide coverage of barrier, which focuses on detecting intruders crossing a specific region. Suppose that all sensors are dropped from an aircraft along a given line interval, and each sensor has circular coverage range of arbitrary radii. Due to the environmental factors, the sensors will be distributed along the deployment line interval with random offsets. We study the barrier coverage problem with line-based offsets deployments by a set of wireless sensors with adjustable coverage ranges. The objective is to find a range assignment with the minimum cost. In this paper, we present a constant-approximation algorithm and two fully polynomial time approximation schemes (FPTASes) for the barrier coverage by using sensors with offsets under a linear cost function on the sensor’s range. We also show the performance of the approximation algorithms by experiments.