Partial Paving Strategy: Application to optimize the Area Coverage Problem in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks
Finding the minimum number of sensor nodes to ensure coverage of an area for a maximum of time duration is an NP-difficult problem, especially in large areas. The mathematical solutions proposed for this problem consist in answering to the question: ”How to place the sensor nodes in n equal circular areas of a given radius to cover the area of interest as much as possible?” Discrete geometry models have been proposed in the literature to analyze and solve this mathematical problem, and we have seen that paving techniques are considered to be the most suitable methods for this kind of problems. Consequently, this paper provides a basic solution of discrete geometry, based on tiling a circle by a minimal number of circles to optimize the coverage problem in wireless sensor networks in this work entiteled: ”Partial Paving of a Circle by Equal Circles strategy (PPoCEC)”. We have proven mathematically the effectiveness of our solution. The simulation which consists of a statistical evaluation step: Asymptotic Confidence Interval (ACI) calculation and another step of comparison with clustering strategies showed that the proposed strategy achieves coverage at 100% for the first 10 nodes deployed in the area of interest compared to the other coverage strategies in sensor networks proposed in the literature.