Boundary Node Identification in Three Dimensional Wireless Sensor Networks for Surface Coverage

Linna WEI  Xiaoxiao SONG  Xiao ZHENG  Xuangou WU  Guan GUI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E102-D   No.6   pp.1126-1135
Publication Date: 2019/06/01
Publicized: 2019/03/04
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2018EDP7355
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Information Network
Keyword: 
boundary node,  distributed,  surface coverage,  three-dimensional network,  coverage problem,  

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Summary: 
With the existing of coverage holes, the Quality of Service (such as event response, package delay, and the life time et al.) of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may become weaker. In order to recover the holes, one can locate them by identifying the boundary nodes on their edges. Little effort has been made to distinguish the boundary nodes in a model where wireless sensors are randomly deployed on a three-dimensional surface. In this paper, we propose a distributed method which contains three steps in succession. It first projects the 1-hop neighborhood of a sensor to the plane. Then, it sorts the projected nodes according to their angles and finds out if there exists any ring formed by them. At last, the algorithm validates a circle to confirm that it is a ring surrounding the node. Our solution simulates the behavior of rotating a semicircle plate around a sensor under the guidance of its neighbors. Different from the existing results, our method transforms a three-dimensional problem into a two-dimensional one and maintaining its original topology, and it does not rely on any complex Hamiltonian Cycle finding to test the existence of a circle in the neighborhood of a sensor. Simulation results show our method outperforms others at the correctness and effectiveness in identifying the nodes on the edges of a three-dimensional WSN.