Fault Tolerant and optimal Barrier Coverage for Critical Area Monitoring

Abstract

Detecting an intruder through the use of barrier coverage is one of the existed applications in wireless sensor networks (WSN). When the intruder is trying to cross the border of the critical area, or move inside it, the deployed WSN should monitor and detect any presence of intruder and generate an alarm to alert the operator to look this specific area. Several solutions have been proposed in the literature like the problem of coverage in wireless sensor networks, which became currently a crucial field of research, especially the barrier coverage for intruder detection. In this paper, we present a new algorithm based on mathematical models, whose objective is to ensure the coverage of our barrier with a minimum possible number of sensors. The idea is to calculate the number of sensors needed to cover a barrier before deployment. We then formulate the problem to minimize the number of sensors to be deployed to properly cover a barrier. Furthermore, we propose a fault-tolerant mechanism, which will be able to detect faulty sensor nodes in the active barrier and activate other sensor nodes in other barriers to ensure a minimum number of sensor nodes needed for a complete coverage barrier. Our simulation results show the validity of our analytical studies and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.