Coverage-driven sensor deployment and energy-efficient information processing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of tiny sensor nodes that can communicate with each other to perform sensing and information processing tasks. The performance of a sensor network depends to a large extent on the sensor field coverage and its lifetime is determined by its energy consumption. There is also a need for energy-efficient and fault-tolerant self-organization. This thesis presents methods for coverage-centric sensor node deployment, as well as techniques for energy-efficient self-organization and information processing. The contributions of this thesis are in four important areas related to infrastructure design for wireless sensor networks: (1) effective sensing coverage; (2) energy-aware information processing; (3) energy-aware topology management and self-organization; (4) fault-tolerant self-organization.; The thesis first presents the virtual force algorithm (VFA) as a new approach for sensor deployment to improve the sensor field coverage after an initial random placement of sensor nodes. The cluster head executes the VFA algorithm to find new locations for sensors to enhance the overall coverage.; The thesis next presents a novel a posteriori energy-aware target localization strategy, which is based on a two-step communication protocol between the cluster head and the sensors reporting the target detection events. This approach reduces energy consumption for target localization by making use of the existing information redundancy in the target data from sensor nodes.; Energy-aware self-organization and topology management are also studied in this thesis. A coverage-centric active nodes selection algorithm is presented to reduce energy consumption by using only a subset of nodes for communication and sensing.; Finally, the thesis presents an analysis of fault tolerance in the self-organization of a wireless sensor network. The analysis leads to a characterization of the amount of redundancy that is necessary in the network for fault tolerance. A distributed algorithm is proposed to select fault tolerance (backup) nodes to compensate for breakage in communication connectivity and loss of sensing coverage due to node failures. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...