Sensor Placement on Utility-Based Target Coverage

Sensor networks can monitor interesting targets and fields. Most existing studies assume a constant utility (i.e. measurement accuracy) model within the sensing region. Yet the utility decreases in some scenarios as the distance becomes large. This paper considers the provisioned sensor placement problem where individual targets require different levels of utilities. The problem formulation is proved to be NP-complete and a heuristic algorithm is then proposed to reduce the number of sensors to be placed as much as possible. The heuristic algorithm is evaluated in terms of the number of sensors from three impacting factors.