Quality of Surveillance Measures in K-Covered Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks, in which the deployed sensors have different capacities, are gradually used to perform critical surveillance in real world. For conserving energy, powerful sensors are usually activated only when an event is detected, while low-cost and error-prone sensors dominate the quality of surveillance (QoSu) when an interesting event just appears. To guarantee a desired QoSu, deploying the K-coverage configuration in HWSNs has attracted much attention. However, little work addresses a significant issue of measuring the fault tolerance level on a K-coverage configuration in HWSNs. In this paper, we first propose an energy-efficient eligibility approach to perform the K-covered HWSNs with very low cost. The QoSu is further formalized in terms of explicit metrics, such as probabilities of system false positives and system false negatives. An appropriate deployment of the K-coverage configuration can thus be determined according to a desired QoSu while prolonging the system lifetime.