Title: A coverage strategy for wireless sensor networks in a three-dimensional environment

Authors: Lin Feng; Tie Qiu; Zhenlong Sun; Feng Xia; Yu Zhou

Addresses: School of Innovation Experiment, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China ' School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116620, China ' School of Innovation Experiment, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China ' School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116620, China ' School of Innovation Experiment, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China

Abstract: Coverage is one of the fundamental issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The detection area is non-ideal and the terrain of the detection area is more complex in applications of three-dimensional sensor networks. Consequently, many of the existing coverage strategies cannot be directly applied to three-dimensional spaces. This paper presents a new coverage strategy for the three-dimensional sensor networks. Sensor nodes are uniformly distributed. The cost factor is utilised to construct the perceived probability and the classical watershed algorithm after the transformation of points from the three-dimensional space to the two-dimensional plane using the dimensionality reduction method, which can maintain the topology characteristic of the non-linear terrain. The detection probability in the optimal breath path is used as the measure to evaluate the coverage. Simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy can determine the coverage with fewer nodes, while achieving the coverage requirements of the networks.

Keywords: 3D WSNs; wireless sensor networks; network coverage; three-dimensional space; 3D space; detection probability; wireless networks; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2014.059904

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2014 Vol.15 No.1/2/3, pp.83 - 94

Received: 14 Jan 2013
Accepted: 29 Jul 2013
Published online: 19 Mar 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article