Coverage and intrusion detection in wireless sensor networks

A Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has been a premier research topic due to the rapid decreasing of sensor equipment costs and the increasing number of WSN applications in both civil and military fields in the past decades. For example, forest fires take millions of acres around the world every year and a WSN can be deployed to provide surveillance service for fire detection. In a WSN application, an intuitive question is that how well the field of interest is monitored by the deployed sensors and what is the possibility that an event such as a fire happened at a specific location can be detected by the WSN. This chapter answers the question by introducing two fundamental performance issues including sensing coverage and intrusion detection and surveys the problem definitions, assumptions, contributions, and primary conclusions in the state-of-the-art literature. Next, the network lifetime as a crucial performance issue in a WSN is explored under the constraints of fulfilling applicationspecified sensing coverage and intrusion detection requirements, and a review of sleepscheduling algorithms in which redundant sensors are configured in sleep mode for energy conservation is provided. Then, we discuss the benefits of introducing a few mobile sensors (i.e., actuators) that can move around the field of interest to help improving sensing coverage, connectivity, intrusion detection capability, and lifetime enhancement. Then another question comes: how to efficiently schedule robots patrol? To address this research issues, biological inspired ideas have been introduced, which has become a hot topic in wireless sensor network. In this chapter, we also study bio-inspired strategies in WSNs.