Rotating Directional Sensors to Mend Barrier Gaps in a Line-Based Deployed Directional Sensor Network

The barrier coverage of a wireless sensor network is an important surveillance application of Internet of Things. Barrier coverage guarantees that all intruders traversing the protected region are detected by a chain of connected sensors. However, when the sensors are randomly deployed, barrier gaps may occur due to deployment randomness or insufficient sensors. How to locate the barrier gaps and mend them is an important aspect in the network. In this paper, we study the barrier gap problem in weak barrier coverage and strong barrier coverage that consist of directional sensors, and the sensors are deployed by a line-based deployment strategy. A gap-finding algorithm is proposed to find subbarriers and barrier gaps. Two gap-mending algorithms are devised to mend barrier gaps in the network: One algorithm is a simple rotation algorithm that only rotates two critical sensors in two subbarriers to fix the gap, and the other algorithm is a chain-reaction rotation algorithm that rotates sensors in the subbarrier in a chain-reaction manner to mend the gap. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed gap-mending algorithms can effectively fix barrier gaps and improve the probability of barrier success construction.