Efficient point coverage in wireless sensor networks

We study minimum-cost sensor placement on a bounded 3D sensing field, R, which comprises a number of discrete points that may or may not be grid points. Suppose we have types of sensors available with different sensing ranges and different costs. We want to find, given an integer 1, a selection of sensors and a subset of points to place these sensors such that every point in R is covered by at least sensors and the total cost of the sensors is minimum. This problem is known to be NP-hard. Let ki denote the maximum number of points that can be covered by a sensor of the ith type. We present in this paper a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for this problem with a proven approximation ratio =

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JCO
• Authors: Jie Wang, Ning Zhong
• Keywords: Discrete Points, JCO 2006, Minimum-cost Sensor Placement, Sensor