Target coverage using a collaborative platform for sensor cloud

Nowadays Sensor-cloud has received a lot of interests among researchers in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) as well as Cloud Computing. An integral part of the Sensor Cloud platform is the Collaboration of WSN providers which improves the utilization of sensor resources. The physical sensors in such a collaborative environment are shared among multiple applications from different administrative domains. In this paper, we propose a Sensor Cloud Architecture which allows the users to deploy their sensor applications on-demand within the collaborative platform. The sensor resources used by the application are provided as a service to the user. The cost for offering such service depends on the number of physical sensors selected for covering the targets (locations of interest) for that application as well as connecting the selected physical sensors to the base station. In this paper, we proposed a two phase algorithm for this problem. In the first phase (Coverage), an Integer Programming Problem(IPP) is used to find a minimum set of sensors to cover the targets. In the next phase (Connectivity) a heuristic is used to extend the set such that connectivity of all the selected sensors is ensured. The performance of the proposed approach is validated through simulation which shows significant improvement of using collaboration over multiple non-collaborative WSNs. We also establish the superiority of the heuristic for ensuring connectivity over one such algorithm in the literature.