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Barrier coverage with wireless sensors

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Abstract

When a sensor network is deployed to detect objects penetrating a protected region, it is not necessary to have every point in the deployment region covered by a sensor. It is enough if the penetrating objects are detected at some point in their trajectory. If a sensor network guarantees that every penetrating object will be detected by at least k distinct sensors before it crosses the barrier of wireless sensors, we say the network provides k-barrier coverage. In this paper, we develop theoretical foundations for k-barrier coverage. We propose efficient algorithms using which one can quickly determine, after deploying the sensors, whether the deployment region is k-barrier covered. Next, we establish the optimal deployment pattern to achieve k-barrier coverage when deploying sensors deterministically. Finally, we consider barrier coverage with high probability when sensors are deployed randomly. The major challenge, when dealing with probabilistic barrier coverage, is to derive critical conditions using which one can compute the minimum number of sensors needed to ensure barrier coverage with high probability. Deriving critical conditions for k-barrier coverage is, however, still an open problem. We derive critical conditions for a weaker notion of barrier coverage, called weak k-barrier coverage.

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Correspondence to Santosh Kumar.

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A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Eleventh Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MobiCom), August 28–September 2, 2005, Cologne, Germany.

Santosh Kumar is a Ph.D. candidate and SBC Presidential Fellow in Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. He received his B. Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU) at Varanasi, India, in 1998. He received his Masters in Computer and Information Science from the Ohio State University in 2002. His current research focusses on the issues of coverage and connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks. Starting Fall 2006, he will join the department of Computer Science at the University of Memphis as an Assistant Professor.

Ten H. Lai is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. A pioneer of Zen Networking, he is interested in the art of applying Zen to the teaching and research of protocol design. He served as the program chair of ICPP’98, the general chair of ICPP’00, the program co-chair of ICDCS’04, and, recently, the general chair of ICDCS’05. He is/was an editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), ACM/Springer Wireless Networks, Academia Sinica’s Journal of Information Science and Engineering (JISE), and International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing.

Anish Arora is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on fault tolerance, security, and timeliness of distributed and networked systems, with special emphasis on wireless sensor networking at large scale. He is an expert in self-stabilization. He has chaired/co-chaired several seminars/conferences in self-stabilization, as well as in distributed computing and computer networking; most recently, Arora has served as program chair of the 25th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’05) and the program co-chair of the Second ACM Conference on Embedded Sensor Networks Systems (SENSYS’04). Arora is an editor of the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, Real Time Systems, and New Generation Systems. His recent research has been supported by DARPA, NSF, and Microsoft Research Embedded Systems Program. Arora received his B. Tech. Degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at New Delhi and his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, all in computer science.

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Kumar, S., Lai, T.H. & Arora, A. Barrier coverage with wireless sensors. Wireless Netw 13, 817–834 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-006-9856-0

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