Coverage problems in wireless sensor networks: designs and analysis

Abstract

Recently, a concept of wireless sensor networks has attracted much attention due to its wide-range of potential applications. Wireless sen-sor networks also pose a number of challeng-ing optimization problems. One of the funda-mental problems in sensor networks is the cov-erage problem, which reflects the quality of ser-vice that can be provided by a particular sensor network. The coverage concept is defined from several points of view due to a variety of sen-sors and a wide-range of their applications. Sev-eral different designs and formulations of cover-age problems have been proposed. They are sub-ject to various topics such as types of interest re-gions (areas vs. targets) and different objectives (maximum network lifetime, minimum coverage breach) with other constraints. In this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art coverage formula-tions, present an overview and analysis of the solutions proposed in recent research literature.