A Target-Oriented Conflict Graph-based Approach for the Coverage Problem in Directional Sensor Networks

Maximizing target coverage with minimum number of sensors is an elementary problem in the area of wireless sensor networks which has many applications in monitoring, tracking, security, and surveillance systems. The recent increase in the use of directional sensors adds a new dimension to the problem. As the problem is understood to be NP-hard, most of the previous works attempt greedy heuristics for achieving a near-optimal solutions. Unlike previous research works, we take a graph theoretic target-oriented approach to the problem and provide a novel solution based on a polynomial time graph algorithm. The usage of graph models minimizes the run time complexity while simultaneously improves the solution’s optimality. In over-provisioned Visual Sensor Networks where there exist sufficient number of sensors to cover all the targets, the suggested approach exhibits promising results.