K-Connected target coverage problem in wireless sensor networks

An important issue in deploying a WSN is to provide target coverage with high energy efficiency and fault-tolerance. Sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network are resource-constrained, especially in energy supply, and prone to failure. In this paper, we study the problem of constructing energy efficient and fault-tolerant target coverage. More specifically, we propose solutions to forming k-connected coverage of targets with the minimal number of active nodes. We first address the k-connected augmentation problem, and then show that the k-connected target coverage problem is NP-hard. We propose two heuristic algorithms to solve the problem. We have carried out extensive simulations to study the performance of the proposed algorithms. The evaluation results have demonstrated their desirable efficiency.