Distributed coverage and connectivity in three dimensional wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates coverage and connectivity issues for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) under three dimensional deployment scenarios. WSNs are deployed over a region to sense the events of interest in a geographical area and transmit collected data to a Base Station (BS). We exploit the inherent redundancy in WSN deployment by finding an optimal set of sensor nodes that can cover the 3D deployment region efficiently while maintaining the network connectivity. In this regard we propose a distributed coverage algorithm (DCA) that allows sensor nodes to form a 1-covered topology by exchanging messages based on the local information. We also present an analytical relation that is used to estimate the sensing range used by the DCA. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.