Using Stimulating Signal to Locate Sensor Clusters within Wireless Sensor Networks

Inhalt:
In many wireless sensor network applications, large quantities of sensors are randomly deployed over a region to perform a variety of monitoring and control tasks. The problem of determining a sensor’s physical location is a challenging one and the sensor location information is extremely crucial for many of these applications. Given the limitations of these sensors, such as: low cost, constrained energy and small size, it is not practically feasible to equip each sensor with a GPS receiver. This motivated many researchers to seek GPS-less solutions for locating sensors within a deployment region. In this paper we propose a new approach that utilizes certain sensing abilities within the sensor itself to locate sensor clusters within a wireless sensor network. Both cluster location and membership information provide valuable measures for sensor network planning and deployment in terms of assessing the degree of coverage and blank coverage spots. These measures help operators to plan post-deployment actions if needed and manage sensor network operations.