Multi-Round Sensor Deployment for Guaranteed Barrier Coverage

Deploying wireless sensor networks to provide guaranteed barrier coverage is critical for many sensor networks applications such as intrusion detection and border surveillance. To reduce the number of sensors needed to provide guaranteed barrier coverage, we propose multi-round sensor deployment which splits sensor deployment into multiple rounds and can better deal with placement errors that often accompany sensor deployment. We conduct a comprehensive analytical study on multi-round sensor deployment and identify the tradeoff between the number of sensors deployed in each round of multi-round sensor deployment and the barrier coverage performance. Both numerical and simulation studies show that, by simply splitting sensor deployment into two rounds, guaranteed barrier coverage can be achieved with significantly less sensors comparing to single-round sensor deployment. Moreover, we propose two practical solutions for multi-round sensor deployment when the distribution of a sensor's residence point is not fully known. The effectiveness of the proposed multi-round sensor deployment strategies is demonstrated by numerical and simulation results.