Area coverage of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks in support of Internet of Things demands

摘要

As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves, more and more Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being deployed in the real world. Connected vehicles, smart grids, smart cities, smart healthcare, networks of robots, and disaster recovery networks are some examples. In WSNs, the area coverage is one of the most important quality of service metrics. A WSN without enough area coverage yields incorrect results. So calculating the covered area of a WSN is mandatory. Previous studies have used a simple approach: all nodes send their location to the sink, and it calculates the covered area centrally which makes huge unnecessary communication overhead. In our previous work titled Distributed Exact Coverage Rate Calculation, we calculated the covered area of a homogenous WSN in a distributed manner. In this paper, we provide a Heterogeneous Distributed Precise Coverage Rate (HDPCR) mechanism that calculates the covered area of a Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network by using a localized mechanism. With the use of boundary detection mechanisms, the HDPCR detects the boundary of the network and calculates its area. HDPCR also detects holes and calculates their area precisely. By subtracting these two calculated values, the covered area of the network can be computed. Many related studies have evaluated the coverage rate approximately with error and require more calculations to reduce the error rate. HDPCR calculates the coverage rate precisely without an error rate using simple arithmetic calculations. The exhaustive simulation also shows the superiority of HDPCR as compared to the previous approaches.