An Evidential Approach for Area Coverage in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The study of coverage problem in uncertain WSN environment requires the consideration of this uncertainty by taking the best possible decisions, since it is impossible to explicitly represent all the combinatorics to produce a conditional active/passive state nodes' planning in the area of interest, and allow reasoning on various environmental states of the partially known physical world. This paper addresses the problem of area coverage based on the Dempster-Shafer theory. The authors aim to ensure the full area coverage while using a subset of connected nodes, with minimal costs using a minimal number of dominant nodes regardless of the type of used deployment (random or deterministic). This is ensured by activating a single node in each subset of each geographic sub-area, thus extending the lifetime of the wireless sensor network to its maximum. The comparison of the proposed model denoted evidential approach for area coverage (EAAC) with two well-known protocols and with a recent one showed a better performance and a slight improvement in the covered area.

A Comparative Study of Deterministic and Uncertain Area Coverage Strategies in WSNs

“…Quantifying data uncertainty will lead to better results and better decisions in wireless sensor network applications. Most existing techniques use heuristics to deal with uncertainty in sensor networks [41]. Uncertainty is marking all types of coverage in WSNs (area coverage, target coverage, and barrier coverage).…”

A fuzzy/possibility approach for area coverage in wireless sensor networks

“…In this context, the coverage problem have been classified in our contributions into two main categories; (a) coverage in sensor networks based on deterministic models and (b) coverage in sensor networks based on uncertain models [32]. In (a) coverage in sensor networks based on deterministic models, we quote: Energetic Sleep-Scheduling via Probabilistic Interference K-Barrier Coverage with Truth-Table Technique in Sensor Network [24], Hybrid Model Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks Coverage Improvement [21], and we quote in (b) coverage in sensor networks based on uncertain models: An Evidential Approach for Area Coverage in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks [3], Area Coverage Optimization in Wireless Sensor Network by Semi-random Deployment (SRDP) [33], Spiderweb strategy: application for area coverage with mobile sensor nodes in 3D wireless sensor network (Spiderweb strategy) [25]…”

“…In order to consider uncertainty to address WSN problems, our proposal consists of introducing the fuzziness in the process of scheduling sensor nodes in WSN for several purposes. Among the types of uncertainty configured in WSN [3], there are:…”