Coverage problems in wireless sensor networks: designs and analysis

Recently, a concept of wireless sensor networks has attracted much attention due to its widerange of potential applications. Wireless sensor networks also pose a number of challenging optimization problems. One of the fundamental problems in sensor networks is the coverage problem, which reflects the quality of service that can be provided by a particular sensor network. The coverage concept is defined from several points of view due to a variety of sensors and a wide-range of their applications. Several different designs and formulations of coverage problems have been proposed. They are subject to various topics such as types of interest regions (areas vs. targets) and different objectives (maximum network lifetime, minimum coverage breach) with other constraints. In this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art coverage formulations, present an overview and analysis of the solutions proposed in recent research literature.