An optimal new-node placement to enhance the coverage of wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks provide a wide range of applications, such as environment surveillance, hazard monitoring, traffic control, and other commercial or military applications. The quality of service provided by a sensor network relies on its coverage, i.e., how well an event can be tracked by sensors. This paper studies how to optimally deploy new sensors in order to improve the coverage of an existing network. The best- and worst-case coverage problems that are related to the observability of a path are addressed and formulated into computational geometry problems. We prove that there exists a duality between the two coverage problems, and then solve the two problems together. The presented placement algorithm is shown to deploy new nodes optimally in polynomial time.