The coverage problem for myopic sensors

The objective of the coverage problem is to organize the monitoring of targets by sensors in an energy efficient manner so as to maximize the lifetime of coverage. We consider the coverage problem in a network of myopic sensors, such as video sensors and acoustic sensors, which are only able to cover one target at any one time. We show how to formulate the problem of finding the lifetime as a linear program. We show that the actual coverage schedule can be found by iteratively finding maximum cardinality matchings in the underlying weighted bipartite graph, where the weights are derived from the solution of the linear program. We show experimentally that this algorithm is practical for moderate sized instances, depending on various properties of the instance.