Modeling and simulating coverage in sensor networks

The coverage problem in wireless sensor network is to place sensor devices in a service area so that the entire service area is covered. We have modeled the coverage problem as two sub-problems: floorplan and placement. The floorplan problem is to partition the service area into well-defined geometric cells, where the placement problem is to assign the sensor devices into a set of cells. Our proposed model has transformed the search space from a continuous into discrete, where the cardinality of the set of cells represents all possible candidate locations to place the sensors. Thus, we have reduced the complexity of the coverage problem, but we have had to merge the two sub-problems (floorplan and placement) into a single optimization problem to achieve good solutions. The objective function is to maximize the coverage of the service area while not exceeding a given budget. The merged optimization problem has been coded into an evolutionary approach and our results present an interesting finding between the cell size and sensor’s radius of coverage.