Coverage Holes Detection In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are composed of tiny and cheap sensor nodes deployed in the target area randomly, and it is a distributive network environment by wireless communication and self-organizing way. With the development of sensor technology, wireless communications and micro-electro-mechanical system, wireless sensor networks merged in recent years. Wireless sensor networks have become an academic research hotspot in recent years. Wireless sensor networks are increasingly being used in various fields, including the field of forest fire prevention, intelligent buildings and facilities, target monitoring and data acquisition, intelligent transportation.The coverage problem in wireless sensor networks is a fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks. It reflects the effect of the perception of wireless sensor networks and the monitoring and control of the target area. Sensor nodes coverage of target area is an important evaluation criterion to measure the quality of service of wireless sensor networks. In order to make the wireless sensor network successfully completed the task of monitoring and information collection, it is necessary to ensure that the sensor nodes can effectively cover the area to be monitored or target.The coverage holes detection is a hot research topic in the wireless sensor network coverage problem. Nonuniform random distribution and exhausted energy of sensor nodes may lead to coverage holes emerged in wireless sensor networks. Coverage holes in wireless sensor networks will make the monitoring data incomplete. It also has an impact on the final decision-making. Therefore, it should be as far as possible to avoid coverage holes in the target area. Even when coverage holes disappear in wireless sensor network, it should be detected immediately to maintain the quality of perception and communication services of wireless sensor networks.Aiming at the problems of coverage holes in wireless sensor networks, although scholars have proposed several wireless sensor network coverage holes detection algorithms, but these algorithms have deficiencies to some extent. Therefore, a geometry-based distributed coverage holes detection algorithm is proposed in this paper, and it is proved theoretically. The main idea of this algorithm is forming a triangle by sensor node and its two neighbor nodes, calculating circurnradius and circumcenter of the triangle and judging existence of coverage holes under the guidance of relevant knowledge of geometric graphics. In order to verify the effectiveness and detection accuracy of the algorithm, this algorithm was implemented on the MATLAB simulation platform. Simulation results on Matlab platform demonstrate that the algorithm not only can detect coverage holes and boundary nodes effectively, but also has a good performance in the energy consumption of sensor nodes.