Minimum perimeter coverage of query regions in a heterogeneous wireless sensor network

Many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require the tracking and the surveillance of target objects. The information to be gathered about the target may be related to only a particular monitored sub-area. Therefore, it is desirable to direct queries only to the nodes monitoring this particular area and for energy saving reasons, only the queried nodes should respond. In this paper, we introduce two new efficient distributed algorithms for finding the minimum number of connected perimeter sensor nodes that are sufficient to cover the perimeter of queried region, where the union of their sensing regions covers the perimeter of queried area. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithms achieve significant reduction in communication load, while preserving full perimeter coverage.