Detecting Coverage Boundary Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

The objective of this paper is to provide a distributed protocol that allows individual sensor nodes to identify themselves as being located on the coverage boundary, which is required in a number of functionalities at both the network and application levels. We develop a deterministic method for boundary node detection based on localized Voronoi polygons, the technique originated from the computational geometry. The advantages of our method are: it is a deterministic one that can be applied to any arbitrarily deployed sensor network, it is truly localized, only need one-hop neighbors´ information, which guarantees the scalability and energy efficiency of the detection algorithms and it requires only a limited number of simple local computations. We also provide mathematical as well as experimental evidence for the correctness and efficiency of this method