Efficient Deployment of Spinning, Directional Sensors for Temporal Coverage of Objects

Because of application requirements or hardware designs, sensor nodes may possess sector-like coverage. On the other hand, with some machinery such as stepper motors, these sensor nodes can spin to cover the objects around them. We call such sensor nodes the spinning, directional (SD) sensors. In the paper, we consider the SD sensor deployment problem, which decides how to deploy the minimum number of SD sensors to cover a set of static objects, such that each object is α-time covered, where 0 < α < 1. An object is α-time covered if it can be covered by at least one sensor for more than or equal to αT time within a fixed period (longer than T ). The SD sensor deployment problem is NP-hard and therefore we propose a heuristic that adopts a greedy strategy, where we deploy each SD sensor that covers the maximum number of objects until all objects can be α-time covered. Simulation results verify that our deployment heuristic can significantly reduce the number of SD sensors to be deployed. The contributions of this paper are to define a new temporal coverage model to monitor objects by SD sensors and develop an efficient deployment heuristic.