Deploying Directional Wireless Sensors with Guaranteed Coverage and Connectivity

Wireless sensor networks inherit the merits of both wireless communications and distributed processing, and therefore are expected to be widely used in many civil and military applications. To successfully perform the assigned sensing tasks, the deployed sensors must both form a connected network through multi-hop wireless communication, and cover the entire working region or some specific locations. Therefore, how to deploy a wireless sensor network to provide connected coverage becomes a critical research issue. Most of the existing work [1], [2] on the connected coverage problem typically assumes omnidirectional sensors with disk-like sensing range. However, in real applications, certain sensors may only possess limited sensing range, such as sector (or directional) sensing range, due to equipment constraints or environmental impairments. In this work, we investigate how to efficiently deploy directional sensors to form connected networks to cover point-locations or the entire target region. To our best knowledge, this is the first effort to address such problems.