Practical Node Deployment Scheme Based on Virtual Force for Wireless Sensor Networks in Complex Environment

Deploying sensors into a target region is a key issue to be solved in building a wireless sensor network. Various deployment algorithms have been proposed by the researchers, and most of them are evaluated under the ideal conditions. Therefore, they cannot reflect the real environment encountered during the deployment. Moreover, it is almost impossible to evaluate an algorithm through practical deployment. Because the deployment of sensor networks require a lot of nodes, and some deployment areas are dangerous for human. This paper proposes a deployment approach to solve the problems mentioned above. Our approach relies on the satellite images and the Virtual Force Algorithm (VFA). It first extracts the topography and elevation information of the deployment area from the high resolution satellite images, and then deploys nodes on them with an improved VFA. The simulation results show that the coverage rate of our method is approximately 15% higher than that of the classical VFA in complex environment.