An Efficient Deployment Heuristic to Support Temporal Coverage of Heterogeneous Objects in Rotatable and Directional (R&D) Sensor Networks

In rotatable and directional (R&D) sensor networks, each sensor has sector-like sensing range and rotation ability. These sensors can support temporal coverage of objects by periodically rotating to cover them. We define that an object is δ_i-time covered if it is covered by a sensor for at least 0 <; δ_i ≤ 1 portion of each period. Given a set of objects where they may have different δ_i-time covered demands, the paper proposes an R&D sensor deployment for heterogeneous objects (RSD-HO) problem which determines how to use the minimum number of R&D sensors to make every object be δ_i-time covered. The RSD-HO problem is NP-hard, so we propose an efficient heuristic by considering the distribution and δ_i values of objects. Simulation results show that our RSD-HO heuristic requires fewer sensors compared with existing schemes. The paper contributes in defining an NP-hard RSD-HO problem and developing an efficient heuristic to solve it.