Power allocation in sensor networks for surveilling security zones

Power consumption and lifetime are essential features of sensor networks. On the one hand, the power consumption should be as low as possible to enable an energy-aware system. On the other hand, the lifetime should be as long as possible to ensure a comprehensive coverage. Especially, for surveilling security zones, e.g., the frontier between two countries or the terrain of military base stations, it is also necessary to achieve high reliability over the whole lifetime. However, these features are contrary and they must be optimized simultaneously to achieve optimal performance. In this paper, we thus aim to investigate the lifetime of bistatic radars for a required minimum reliability and any given power resources. We first describe the underlying scenario and subsequently develop a graph based optimization method to maximize the lifetime. By selected results, we finally show the performance of the new approach and discuss the power consumption of the sensor network.