Directional Wireless Sensor Networks with Guaranteed and Coverage and Connectivity

To successfully perform the assigned sensing tasks by a wireless sensor network, sensors must both form a connected network via multi-hop wireless communication, and cover the entire working area or some specific locations. Therefore, deploying a wireless sensor network to provide connected coverage becomes a critical research issue. Most of the existing work [1] on the connected coverage problem typically assumes omnidirectional sensors with disk-like sensing coverage. However, in real deployment, certain sensors may only possess limited sensing coverage, such as sector (or directional) sensing coverage, due to equipment constraints or environmental impairments. In this work, we investigate how to efficiently deploy directional sensors to form connected networks to cover a set of point-locations or the entire target area. To our best knowledge, this is the first effort to address such problems.