Maximizing Strong Barriers in Lifetime-Heterogeneous Directional Sensor Network

Directional sensor network (DSN) has been widely used to detect intrusions and provide fine-grained border surveillance. Despite that barrier coverage in DSN has been intensively studied in recent years under numerous assumptions, various lifetimes of sensor nodes haven't been taken into account. In reality, the lifetimes of sensors are generally different, and the lifetime heterogeneity does affect the surveillance performance since the failure of a single node in a sensor barrier leads to blind areas in surveillance regions. In this paper, we focus on solving a strong barrier coverage problem with lifetime-heterogeneous rotatable directional sensors. Taking into account the non-uniform lifetimes of sensor nodes, we innovatively construct an extended directional barrier graph to model the problem. An efficient algorithm using two-round maximum flow algorithm (TMFA) is proposed to find the maximum barrier number, which in turn maximizes the life span of surveillance. Extensive simulations show that TFMA achieves near-optimal performance and outperforms other heuristic methods.