Cluster based algorithm for volumetric coverage in wireless visual sensor network

One of the main concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is the formation of full coverage of the monitored field. Conventional studies of this topic focus on two-dimension or plane coverage. However these simplified plane coverage models can not accurately characterize actual situations for visual sensor networks. Hence we propose volumetric coverage, which considers three dimensional instead of plane coverage. For this purpose, a visual sensor network is modeled using two undirected graphs: a communication graph that represents data links between nodes, and a vision graph, which represents adjacency of field of views of the sensors. Our proposed algorithm clusters sensors using the vision graph. The formed clusters are used to select sensors to preserve volumetric coverage. One of the goals of the proposed cluster based method is minimum energy usage in the battery operated sensors for network-lifetime elongation. Simulation results prove functionality of our method.