Sensor deployment and medium access control for military surveillance applications in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As computer hardware, software, and radio frequency (RF) technologies have been advanced over the decade, wireless sensor networks enable new applications that involve a tight coupling between the conventional computing infrastructure and the physical world. Recently, sensors come in many types and shapes and can measure almost kinds of physical stimulus. Therefore, the practical use of wireless sensor networks is going various and wide into almost every domain. However, there are also many technical challenges that still need considerable researches and developments. The challenges become even more demanding if we consider the constraints of wireless sensor networks, such as low processing power, bandwidth, limited battery life, and short radio ranges. In this dissertation, we have introduced two researches which directly affect the performance of wireless sensor networks: sensor deployment and medium access control. First, we propose Voronoi diagram based autonomous mobile sensor deployment for maximizing coverage in wireless sensor networks (VAMSD). The deployment of sensors is the most important task in wireless sensor networks, because the effectiveness of these networks absolutely depends on how well sensor nodes are deployed. However, the manual deployment cannot be utilized because the battle fields are very dangerous and harsh. Most of previous works are based on the centralized or the potential field based approach that is one of the distributed approaches. In the centralized approach, a single sensor node has full responsibilities for determining target points and unicasting the proper relocated points to all sensor nodes. On the other hand, all sensor nodes have attractive and repulsive forces to each other in the potential field based approach, and the force of all sensor nodes remains in equilibrium after completing this scheme. However, to achieve this equilibrium state, each sensor node should move iteratively until reaching the final destina...