A Survey of Solutions for the Coverage Problems in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recently, wireless sensor networks have attracted a lot of attention. Such environments may consist of many inexpensive nodes, each capable of collecting, storing, and processing environmental information, and communicating with neighboring nodes through wireless links. In this paper, we survey a fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks, the coverage problem, which reflects how well an area is monitored or tracked by sensors. We first study several relevant computational geometric problems. Then, a number of papers aimed at solving the coverage problem in wireless sensor networks are discussed. We will address issues such as surveillance and exposure of sensor networks, coverage and connectivity in network deployment, and coverage- and energy-preserving protocols for sensor networks.