OPEN: An Optimization Scheme of N-node coverage in wireless sensor networks

Deployment is an important issue in wireless sensor networks(WSNs). Most of recent researches focus on the full coverage deployment with the minimum number of sensors. In practice, there are finite number of nodes in WSNs applications, and many regions are too vast to be monitored by the limited number of sensors; On the other hand, the information that we are interested unevenly distributed in the region. How to deploy the finite number of sensors reasonably is an actual issue which should not be neglected. In this paper, we propose a new coverage problem in sensor networks named N-node coverage, which refers to using the limited number of nodes to obtain the maximum amount of information in the region, we put forward the concept of Information Density as a new metric for coverage performance measurement. Base on this metric and incorporated the sensing model, we constructed the N-node network coverage model and convert the deployment problem to a combinatorial optimization problem, we present a heuristic optimization deployment algorithm, the OPEN, to solve the problem. Experimental results show that OPEN is an effective algorithm for improving the coverage performance of the sensor network.