Extending lifetime of sensor surveillance systems in data fusion model

A critical aspect of the sensor surveillance systems is the network lifetime. Sensors are often battery-powered and they have limited energy constraint. Therefore, it is crucial to extend the network lifetime. However, most existing schemes which extend the lifetime of sensor surveillance systems are based on simplistic sensing models (e.g., the disc model) which do not capture the signal attenuation and the collaboration among sensors. In practice, data fusion has been adopted in a number of sensor systems to improve sensing performance. In this paper, we investigate how to extend the lifetime of sensor surveillance systems in data fusion model. Given a set of sensors and a set of targets in a plane, each target needs to be monitored all the time. The problem of our concern is to schedule the sensors to monitor all the targets, such that the lifetime of this surveillance system is extended. The network lifetime is defined as the time duration when each target is monitored. Our work takes the fact that signal attenuates as the distance increases into consideration. We propose two heuristic algorithms to organize sensors into nondisjoint cover sets and activate them successively. Extensive simulations have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the algorithms.