Sensor network nodes deployment based on Artificial Potential Functions

With the rapid development of detecting technology, sensors have been more and more applied in this area. In this paper an algorithm is proposed for sensor network nodes deployment based on artificial potential functions. First, sensor network nodes are initialized to fulfill the completeness with no regard for optimization. Then, according to a series of principles, they are adjusted to achieve the aims of guaranteeing the completeness of information for each road, the complete communication coverage and the lowest costs on the sensor devices deployment as well. In addition, with some experiments, the proposed algorithm is proved to be more suitable for a dense road network than for a sparse one. In order to improve the algorithm and solve some possible problems, some long-distance sensor nodes have been deployed in certain places and division of sensor nodes have been done to those heavy-load nodes.