Optimizing Detection Quality and Transmission Quality of Barrier Coverage in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes an algorithm, called the Optimized Barrier Coverage Algorithm (OBCA), to optimize the quality of the barrier coverage formed by a wireless sensor network (WSN). OBCA aims at optimizing the barrier coverage quality in terms of the detection degree, the detection quality, and the transmission quality (i.e., the expected transmission time). This paper also proposes a model to formulate the minimum detection probability between two WSN sensors with different sensing ranges. With the model, OBCA can be applied to heterogeneous WSNs whose sensors have various sensing ranges. OBCA’s optimization is proved, and its time complexity is analyzed. The performance of OBCA is simulated and compared with those of two related algorithms.