Efficient Visual Sensor Coverage Algorithm in Wireless Visual Sensor Networks

Traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) transmits the scalar data (e.g., temperature, irradiation) to the sink node. A new Wireless Visual Sensor Network (WVSN) that can transmit images is a more promising solution than the WSN on sensing, detecting and monitoring the environment to enhance awareness of the cyber, physical, and social contexts of our daily activities. Sensor coverage in WVSN is more challenging than in WSN due to besides the sensing range coverage, the Field of View (FoV) should also be considered in deploying the sensors. In this paper, we study the sensor coverage problem in WVSN. We first propose the mathematical model to formulate the sensor coverage problem in WVSN. We devise a heuristic algorithm (FoVIC) algorithm to tackle this sensor coverage problem in WVSN. The basic idea of FoVIC algorithm is to deploy a sensor one at a time that can cover the largest number of uncovered nodes and then the algorithm checks for any sensor deployed in the earlier stage that could be removed. From the computational experiments, they show that larger span angle could help the sensors to cover more nodes in bigger grid size and fewer sensors will be need in smaller grid size when in fixed sensing range and span angle.