An enhanced sensor deployment scheme for automated smart environments

For the wireless sensor network (WSN) to operate successfully, a critical issue is to provide sufficient sensing coverage. In this paper, we target on smart environments and deal with both the homogeneous (having identical sensing radius) and heterogeneous sensors (having different sensing ranges) equipped with locomotion facilities to assist in the sensor self-deployment. An enhanced virtual forces algorithm with boundary forces (EVFA-B) protocol is proposed to realize an automated monitoring network. The EVFA-B mechanism exerts weighted attractive and repulsive forces on each sensor based on predefined distance thresholds. Resultant forces then guide the sensors to their suitable positions with the objective of enhancing the sensing coverage (after a possibly random placement of sensors). To achieve high coverage ratio, we infer that good choices for the associated weight constants greatly depend on sensor population and monitored area size, while independent of sensing radius. Performance of the proposed sensor deployment strategy is evaluated in terms of surveillance coverage and moving energy consumption. We also implement our EVFA-B deployment mechanism in a real-life monitoring network (MoNet) to demonstrate the protocol feasibility.