SensDep: a design tool for the deployment of heterogeneous sensing devices

In this paper, we introduce SensDep as a software design tool that incorporates several solution strategies to optimize sensor networks cost and coverage. The tool helps the designer answer many "what-if" questions that usually arise in the design of surveillance operations networks. Also, it considers several operation capabilities for the sensing devices including reliability, mobility, transfer cost, sensors' cost, lifespan and power self scheduling in addition to the environment parameters during the deployment process. Moreover, it provides the designer the optimal deployment scheme for small size designs using mathematical programming. It also provides near optimal schemes for large scale designs using a set of heuristic solutions. A set of experiments is conducted to test the tool capabilities for different design settings. Several design scenarios are presented to illustrate how the tool can be utilized