A critical line based boundary surveillance strategy in wireless sensor networks

Environment monitoring is an important wireless sensor network application. A traditional method for such applications is to deploy sensors all over a region and aim to cover as much area as possible. However, this method is not only a great waste of money and resources, but also unnecessary and unrealistic. It also invokes many data collisions and places a serious burden on the network protocols. In this paper, we propose a critical line based environment surveillance strategy. We deploy sensors along critical lines instead of all over the region. Our aim is to capture or detect a target or target event rather than tracking it. As coverage is an important factor impacting monitoring, we study boundary coverage capability under several conditions and consider different deployments of sensors. We also compare our surveillance strategy to the traditional one, and the results show that our strategy saves many sensors. Furthermore, we abstract a model of the problem, which provides an optimizing solution to surveillance applications.