Sensor placement algorithms for confident information coverage in wireless sensor networks

Coverage is an important performance metric in wireless sensor networks, which reflects how well a sensor field is monitored by the deployed sensors. This paper studies the sensor placement problem for ensuring network coverage. Instead of using the simplistic disk coverage model, we adopt our recently proposed confident information coverage model for field attribute monitoring applications. The sensor field is divided into grid cells each with equal area, and sensors can be only placed at the center of each grid cell. Our objective is to place the least number of sensors to provide confident information coverage for all the grid points. We first formulate the sensor placement problem as a constrained optimization problem and use the exhaustive search algorithm to find the optimal solution. To reduce computation complexity, we also propose two greedy algorithms to find the approximate solutions. The simulation results show that the performance of the two proposed algorithms is close to the optimal solution obtained by the exhaustive search algorithm yet with significantly reduced computation complexity.