Maintaining differentiated coverage in heterogeneous sensor networks

Most existing research considers homogeneous sensor networks, which suffer from performance bottleneck and poor scalability. In this paper, we adopt a heterogeneous sensor network model to overcome these problems. Sensing coverage is a fundamental problem in sensor networks and has been well studied over the past years. However, most coverage algorithms only consider the uniform coverage problem, that is, all the areas have the same coverage degree requirement. In many scenarios, some key areas need high coverage degree while other areas only need low coverage degree. We propose a differentiated coverage algorithm which can provide different coverage degrees for different areas. The algorithm is energy efficient since it only keeps minimum number of sensors to work. The performance of the differentiated coverage algorithm is evaluated through extensive simulation experiments. Our results show that the algorithm performs much better than any other differentiated coverage algorithm.