Fault tolerant barrier coverage for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Barrier coverage is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks for security applications (e.g., border protection), the performance of which is highly related with locations of sensor nodes. Existing work on barrier coverage mainly assume that sensor nodes have accurate location information, however, little work explores the effects of location errors on barrier coverage. In this paper, we study the barrier coverage problem when sensor nodes have location errors and deploy mobile sensor nodes to improve barrier coverage if the network is not barrier covered after initial deployment. We analyze the relationship between the true distance and the measured distance of two stationary sensor nodes and derive the minimum number of mobile sensor nodes needed to connect them with a guarantee when nodes location errors. Furthermore, we propose a fault tolerant weighted barrier graph, based on which we prove that the minimum number of mobile sensor nodes needed to form barrier coverage with a guarantee is the length of the shortest path on the graph. Simulation results validate the correctness of our analysis.