Coverage hole and boundary nodes detection in wireless sensor networks

Full coverage is critical for the applications of surveillance and monitoring in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the emergence of coverage holes is unavoidable generally due to various reasons. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm using the properties of empty circles to evaluate whether coverage holes exist or not in WSNs and to identify the exact nodes on the boundaries of holes. Our algorithm is divided into two phases: (1) coverage hole detection and coarse boundary nodes clustering and (2) boundary nodes refining. We show the correctness of our algorithm by theoretical proofs. Simulation results confirm that our algorithm can detect all the coverage holes, and our algorithm has better performance in boundary nodes recognition compared with other similar works.