Maximum lifetime of reinforced barrier-coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

A subset of sensors in wireless sensor networks provides barrier-coverage over an area of interest if the sensor nodes are dividing the area into two regions such that any object moving from one region to another is guaranteed to be detected by a sensor. In many practical scenarios, it may be desirable to detect an intruder that enters the region through any of its sides and exits through any other of its sides. That is, not only detect top-down movement, but also side-to-side, and even turn from one side to another. In this paper, we introduce a new barrier-coverage problem whose objective is to maximize the network lifetime such that any penetration of the intruder is detected. To solve the problem, we create a new form of sensor barriers, which we refer to as reinforced barriers, which can detect any movement variation of the attacker. Also, we propose three approaches to obtain these barriers from a given layout of sensor nodes, and we then compare their relative performances through extensive simulations.