A New Sensing Direction Rotation Approach to Area Coverage Optimization in Directional Sensor Network

Abstract

Coverage is a crucial issue in directional sensor networks (DSNs), and a high coverage ratio ensures a good quality of service (QoS). However, a DSN encounters various problems because they use directional sensor nodes, which are characterized by directionality and a definite sensing angle. To address the area coverage problem of DSNs, this paper proposes a new sensing direction rotation approach to optimize coverage. First, we conduct grid partitioning in the target area and propose a coverage verification algorithm to justify the coverage situation of the grid points. Then, we utilize particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find an optimal sensing direction group of the directional sensor nodes to maximize the coverage ratio. Extensive simulation experiments were conducted to prove the effectiveness and reliability of our proposed approach. The results show that the approach improves the area coverage ratio of DSNs in various scenarios.