Effective Area Coverage of 2D and 3D Environments With Directional and Isotropic Sensors

The problem of finding the optimal deployment of sensors is becoming increasingly important with the growing expansion of the Internet of Things paradigm and increased usage of sensor networks in different applications. During the installation of sensor networks, sensor placement directly affects the performance of the system. The general problem of determining the position and orientation of the sensors with the goal of optimal coverage of a given environment is NP-hard. In this manuscript, an effective stochastic method for the placement of sensors in arbitrarily given two-dimensional and three-dimensional environments is proposed. The method uses models of generic isotropic and directional sensors with the defined probabilistic coverage. The optimization function combining the environment and sensor models based on the area coverage metric is proposed. Three optimization algorithms are compared with regard to obtained coverage score, execution time, and reliability, and the results are presented and discussed.