Revisiting the State-of-the-art Deployment and Coverage Preserving Performance for WSN

Abstract

The deployment and coverage are considered as the fundamental performance indicators in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Finding an optimal sensors deployment strategy that is low cost and provides high-quality coverage and connectivity is a difficult problem. Quality of coverage (QoC) and quality of service (QoS) in WSN are the direct result of the sensors deployment strategy employed in the region of interest. Sensors deployment strategy in WSN aligns with the goals of the WSN application. The aim of this study is to review the optimization techniques for sensors deployment and network coverage and connectivity used in the past few years. An optimized sensor deployment strategy is the one where the network delivers the desired sensing goal while keeping the network connected. Both problem areas are interconnected and can greatly affect the performance of the wireless sensor network. The cost and success of a wireless sensor network greatly depend on the sensing objective of the network. A WSN can be heavily deployed with sensors has greater performance but the operating cost is also higher. While achieving the sensing goal with a minimal number of sensors is a low-cost operation, it cannot be fault tolerant and can also be prone to delays in communication. Therefore, most wireless sensor networks discussed here are a tradeoff between the two objectives.