Barrier Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks: From Lined-based to

Curve-based Deployment
Shibo He

, Xiaowen Gong

, Junshan Zhang

, Jiming Chen

and Youxian Sun

School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, China

Email: {shibo.he, xgong9, Junshan.Zhang}@asu.edu, {jmchen, xysun}@iipc.zju.edu.cn
AbstractThis paper studies deterministic sensor deployment
to ensure barrier coverage in wireless sensor networks. Most of
existing work focused on line-based deployment, ignoring a wide
spectrum of potential curve-based solutions. We, for the rst time,
extensively study the sensor deployment under general settings.
We rst present a condition under which line-based deployment
is suboptimal, pointing to the advantage of curve-based deploy-
ment. By constructing a contracting mapping, we identify the
characteristics for a deployment curve to be optimal. We then
design sensor deployment algorithms for the optimal deployment
curve by introducing a new notion of distance-continuous. Our
ndings show that i) when the deployment curve is distance-
continuous, the proposed algorithm is optimal in terms of the
vulnerability corresponding to the deployment, and ii) when the
deployment curve is not distance-continuous, the approximation
ratio of the vulnerability corresponding to the deployment by
the proposed algorithm to the optimal one is upper bounded
by min

,
||

AB||
||

AGB||
2n+

21
2n

, where ||

AB||, ||

AGB|| and n are

constants. Extensive numerical results corroborate our analysis.
I. INTRODUCTION
Different from area coverage, which focuses on collecting
the information occurring within the region of interest (ROI),
barrier coverage is concerned with the detectability of intruders
traversing across the ROI. Due to its applicability in a variety
of systems, ranging from enemy intrusion detection to terri-
tory boundary surveillance to animal behavior study, barrier
coverage is garnering more and more attention in the eld of
wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [1][2][3].
There are mainly two approaches to achieve barrier coverage
in WSNs. The rst approach, namely random deployment,
assumes that sensors are abundant and randomly distributed
over the ROI with high density. Under such a condition, one
primary question is to verify how many (strong, weak, or local)
barriers in total can be found in the networks, and when found
(say k
1
), how to schedule sensors in a distributed and energy-
efcient way to guarantee that the active sensors can form
at least k
2
(k
2
k
1
) barriers [4][5]. Clearly, the random
deployment may result in suboptimal network topology and
thus degrades the barrier coverage performance. Therefore, it
is of great interest to deploy sensors as few as possible while
ensuring the desirable performance. This motivates the second
approach, namely deterministic deployment, which aims at
This research was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foun-
dation under grants CNS-0917087 and CNS-1117462, DoD MURI project
No. FA9550-09-1-0643, NSFC under grants 61222305 and 61190110, NSFZJ
under grant R1100324, SRFDP under grant 20120101110139, 111 Program
under grant B07031 and 863 High-Tech Project under grant 2011AA040101-
1.
globally optimizing the locations of sensors to minimize the
total number of sensors while ensuring the barrier coverage
performance.
Since barrier coverage does not require full coverage of the
ROI, sensors can be deployed on any curve connecting the left
and right boundaries of the ROI so that every traversing path
of an intruder would intersect with the curve. We refer to such
curve as a deployment curve. The sensor deployment problem
then can be treated as two separate steps: i) nding an optimal
deployment curve, and ii) determining the optimal locations
of sensors on the deployment curve. Compared to extensive
literature on random deployment, much less attention has been
paid to deterministic deployment, and yet they all focus on
line-based deployment [6][3][7]. For example, [6] considers
deploying camera sensors on a line segment to ensure full-view
barrier coverage, and [3] assumes that sensors can move along
a line segment to detect intruders. The line-based deployment
reduces the problem dimension and facilitates analysis, but it
is likely to miss a number of potential solutions that may entail
a better barrier coverage performance. There is a pressing
need to obtain a deep understanding of the deployment scheme
under general settings, and this is the focus of this work.
This work takes the rst attempt to explore all possible de-
ployment strategies to enhance barrier coverage performance.
Our contributions are summarized as follows:
We systematically study the subproblem of nding the
optimal deployment curve. We rst show that when the
length of the shortest deployment line segment in the ROI
is larger than the length of shortest deployment curve,
line-based deployment is suboptimal, thus revealing the
advantage of the curve-based deployment. We then pro-
ceed to characterize the optimal deployment curve, which
is highly non-trivial as it is difcult to evaluate the
optimality of a curve without the knowledge of the
corresponding optimal sensor placement. By constructing
a contracting mapping, we are able to compare the
vulnerability (a performance metric of barrier coverage)
between a convex curve and an arbitrary curve, through
which we derive characteristics for the deployment curve
to be optimal.
We proceed to design placement algorithms for the
optimal deployment curve. It is extremely difcult to
design the optimal placement algorithms for the gen-
eral setting. We hence rst introduce an important no-
tion, i.e., distance-continuous curve, in the same spirit
as introducing convex optimization in non-linear opti-
978-1-4673-5946-7/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE
2013 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM
470
mization. We investigate the properties of a distance-
continuous curve, showing that there are a large col-
lection of distance-continuous curves. Then we pro-
ceed to present two placement algorithms CSD-DC and
CSD-NDC. Our results show that when the deploy-
ment curve is distance-continuous, CSD-DC can at-
tain the optimal deployment, and, when the deployment
curve is not distance-continuous, the approximation ra-
tio of the vulnerability of the deployment obtained by
CSD-NDC to the optimal one is upper bounded by
min

,
||

AB||
||

AGB||
2n+

21
2n

, where ||

AB||, ||

AGB|| and
n are constants related to the problem.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We present
in Sec. II the system model. In Sec. III, we give a sufcient
condition to characterize if a curve is the optimal deployment
curve, based on which sensor placement algorithms are treated
in depth in Sec. IV. We provide numerical results in Sec. V
to verify our analysis. We conclude our work in Sec. VI.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
We consider the deployment of a wireless sensor network
to monitor a region of interest of arbitrary shape, which is
a connected region without holes inside, and is enclosed by
four continuous curves: an entrance side

AB, a destination
side

CD, a left boundary side

AC and a right boundary
side

BD, as illustrated in Fig. 1(a). Intruders are assumed
to traverse region from any path beginning from the point
on the entrance side

AB and ending from the point on the
destination side

CD. In practice, can be regarded as the
intermediate zone that prevents intruders from accessing the
security zone adjacent to the destination side. We will use

XY
to denote a curve, and XY to denote a line segment, where X
and Y are the start and end points of the curve/line segment.
The length of curve

XY (for line segment XY ) is denoted
by ||

XY || (||XY ||).
There are n sensors available to detect intruders while
they are crossing . Denote the location of sensor i by T
i
,
i = 1, 2, , n. We use the practical SNR-based sensing
model, i.e., for a target located at X, the received SNR at
sensor i is given by SNR
i
(X) =

||TiX||

[8], where and

are constant parameters related to sensor hardware technology.
The vulnerability of the location X under sensor deployment
scheme T = {T
1
, T
2
, , T
n
} can then be quantied by
V
T
(X) = min
i
||T
iX||

, where =

. In this work we assume

that the connectivity can be guaranteed when the desirable
sensing quality is maintained, and that reporting the detected
intruders to the sink node can be implemented by existing
routing algorithms (e.g., geographic routing [9]).
A curve

Y Y

is a candidate barrier if it intersects

with any path P which intruders traverse from the entrance
side to the destination side. For a candidate barrier

Y Y

, its
vulnerability V under deployment T is dened as V
T
(

Y Y

) =
max
X

Y Y

V
T
(X). A candidate barrier

XX

is better than a
candidate barrier

Y Y

, denoted by V(

XX

) V(

Y Y

), if
B
A
C D
E F
(

(a) Intruder path P and a barrier

B.
B
A
C D
G
H
P
M
(b) The process of drawing normal line
for each point P, P

.
Fig. 1. Region .
there exists a deployment T

such that V
T
(

XX

) V
T
(

Y Y

)
holds for any arbitrary deployment T.
A curve

XX

is a sensor deployment curve if

XX

itself is
a candidate barrier. For a deployment scheme T on deployment
curve

XX

, there is a corresponding optimal barrier

B
X
B
X
,
which satises V
T
(

B
X
B
X
) V
T
(

ZZ

), where

ZZ

, Z

AC, Z

BD, is an arbitrary candidate barrier. When the
deployment curve

XX

is not a line segment, its optimal

barrier

B
X
B
X
may not coincide with

XX

. The goal of this

work is to nd an optimal deployment curve in and deploy
the available n sensors to form an optimal barrier.
III. SENSOR DEPLOYMENT: FROM LINE-BASED TO
CURVE-BASED
Most of existing work on sensor deployment for barrier
coverage assumed that the deployment curve is a line segment.
We in this section systematically investigate the condition
under which the line-based deployment is suboptimal, and
for the rst time point out the advantage of the curve-based
deployment.
Denote by L the shortest line segment connecting the left
and right boundary sides (referred to as shortcut hereafter).
As L may not always belong to , we further let EF and
C denote the shortest deployment line segment and shortest
deployment curve, respectively. As illustrated in Fig. 1(a), AB
is the shortcut, and

AB is the shortest deployment curve. For
a curve

XX

, its diameter, denoted by D(

XX

), is dened as
the largest distance between any two points on the curve, i.e.,
D(

XX

) = max
P,P

XX

||PP

||. We have the following result

(All the proofs in the following can be found in [10]).
Lemma 1: For a deployment curve

XX

and a deployment
line segment Y Y

, V(Y Y

) V(

B
X
B
X
) under the condition
D(

XX

) ||Y Y

||.
Lemma 1 can be obtained directly from Theorem 1 in [11].
When ||L|| = ||EF||, i.e., the shortest line segment is also a
shortcut, for any deployment curve

XX

, D(

XX

) ||EF||.
According to Lemma 1, V(EF) V(

B
X
B
X
). Therefore,
under this condition, line-based deployment is optimal.
However, when ||L|| < ||EF||, line-based deployment may
not be optimal. We proceed to nd a sufcient condition under
which line-based deployment is suboptimal, i.e., there exists
a deployment curve

XX

such that V(

XX

) < V(EF) (thus

V(

B
X
B
X
) V(

XX

) < V(EF)). We have the following

results.
471
Lemma 2: Assume that

XX

is a deployment curve and

Y Y

is a deployment line segment. If ||

XX

|| ||Y Y

||,
then V(

XX

) V(Y Y

).
Suppose that Y Y

is a deployment line segment of length

||C||. When ||C|| < ||EF||, it is obvious that V(Y Y

) <
V(EF). According to Lemma 2, V(C) V(Y Y

) < V(EF).
We have the following theorem.
Theorem 1: The line-based deployment is strictly subopti-
mal when ||C|| < ||EF||.
Theorem 1 indicates that curve-based deployment is more
preferable when ||C|| < ||EF||. Under this condition, a natural
question is how to nd the optimal deployment curve, which
is extremely difcult as region can be of arbitrary shape.
We give a sufcient condition to characterize the optimal
deployment curve in this paper. The necessary condition is
still an open issue.
Since C is the curve in with smallest length, it is of
great interest to study if C is the optimal deployment curve.
One observation is that part of C must intersect with the
entrance or destination side. We can verify this observation
by contradiction. Assume C lies within . Find two points
X and X

on C such that line segment XX

and
||XX

|| < ||

XX

||, where

XX

is the sub-curve of C between

X and X

. As C is not a line segment, such two points

can be found as long as ||XX

|| is sufciently small. This

indicates that C is not the shortest deployment curve, which
is a contradiction. Without loss of generality, assume part of
C is on the entrance side. For easy presentation, we assume
entrance side

AB is the shortest deployment curve. Other cases

can be solved similarly, perhaps in a more complicated way.
One main result is that the shortest deployment curve

AB
will be the optimal deployment curve under certain conditions.
Before elaborating this, we rst give a mapping g and present
Lemma 3 as follows.
Assume that is a convex region enclosed by several
continuous and (piecewise) twice differentiable curves. Denote
the boundary of by . The mapping g is given as follows.
For any point P outside , nd a point M on , such
that PM MM

, where MM

is the tangent line of point

M and PM = M. If such M exists, let g(P) = M.
As is continuous and (piecewise) differentiable, we can
not nd such M when P is in subregions as shown in Fig.
2(a), which is caused by the non-differentiable points on .
Denote such subregions by {A
1
, A
2
, }, and the correspond-
ing non-differentiable points that cause the subregions by
{X
1
, X
2
, }. Set g(P) = X
i
when P is in the subregion
A
i
. We have the following result about the mapping g.
3
3
1
;
2
;
3
;
4
;
)
1

2
3

' 3
<
' <
(a) (b)
M
N
' 0
' 1
3
' 3
'' 1
)
w)
Fig. 2. An Illustration of Lemma 3.
Lemma 3: For any two points P and P

outside the region

, let M = g(P) and N = g(P

), M, N . Then we
have that ||PP

|| ||MN||.
Denote the region enclosed by line segment AB and curve

AB by

. It is easy to verify that region

has the following

property.
Property 1: Region

is a convex region with continuous

and (piecewise) differentiable boundary

.
With Property 1, for any differentiable point P, P

,
draw its tangent line and then draw a normal line PM that
passes through P and is perpendicular to the tangent line; for
a point P from set of non-differentiable points, P

,
draw its left tangent and right tangent lines, and then draw
two normal lines passing through P, which are perpendicular
to these two tangent lines, respectively. See an illustration in
Fig. 1(b). For each normal line, we only consider the ray PM
which only intersects with

on one point P. Let G be

the intersection point of the curve

ACDB and the normal
lines, which has the minimum ||

AG||. Likewise, let H be the

intersection point of the curve

BDCA and normal lines which
has the minimum ||

BH||. We have the following theorem.

Theorem 2: The shortest deployment curve

AB is the
optimal deployment curve when one of the following four
conditions holds:
G

AC and H

BD, and the lengths of shortcuts
between curves

AC and

HD,

GC and

BD are larger
than ||

AB||;
G /

AC and H

BD, and the length of shortcut
between curves

AC and

HD is larger than ||

AB||;
G

AC and H /

BD, and the length of shortcut
between curves

GC and

BD is larger than ||

AB||;
G /

AC and H /

BD.
From Theorem 2, we can easily get the following corollary.
Corollary 1: For any curve

APB in the region , whose
start point is A and end point is B, we have V(

AB)
V(

APB

), where

APB

is the optimal barrier corresponding

to deployment curve

APB under the optimal placement.
We note that when ||

AB|| < ||EF||,

AB can obtain a better
barrier coverage than that by the line-based approach even if
none of the four conditions in Theorem 2 holds.
IV. CURVES-BASED SENSOR DEPLOYMENT
In this section, we proceed to design Curves-based Sensor
Deployment scheme (CSD) for curve

AB. The outline of this
section is as follows: we rst introduce the concept of distance-
continuous; then we design deployment algorithms CSD-DC
and CSD-NDC for cases when deployment curve

AB is and
is not distance-continuous, respectively.
A. Distance-continuous
For a point P on a curve

XX

, let Z(P, d) = {P

|P

XX

, ||PP

|| d}, d [0, +), i.e., Z(P, d) is the set

of points on curve

XX

which are within distance d from

point P. Let ||Z(P, d)|| denote the total length of curves
in Z(P, d). As illustrated in Fig. 3(a), Z(P, d
1
) =

P
1
P
2
,
472
||Z(P, d
1
)|| = ||

P
1
P
2
||, Z(P, d
2
) =

XP
3


P
4
P
5
, and
||Z(P, d
2
)|| = ||

XP
3
|| + ||

P
4
P
5
||. Points in Z(P, d
1
) are
connected while points in Z(P, d
2
) are not.
Denition 1: A continuous curve

XX

is distance-
continuous if Z(P, d) is connected, and ||Z(P, d)|| is a con-
tinuous function of d, for any P

XX

and d [0, ).
Denition 2: For two points P and P

on the curve

XX

,
P is prior to P

(denoted by P < P

), if ||

XP|| < ||

XP

||;
P is a peer of P

(denoted by P = P

), if ||

XP|| = ||

XP

||.
1
G
2
G
1
3
2
3
3
3
4
3
5
3
; ' ;
3
(a) Z(P, d) and |Z(P, d)|.
;
' ;
3
' 3
'' 3
<
k
' ;;
k
' ;*;
(b) An illustration of Property 2
Fig. 3. An illustration of distance-continuous.
With the denitions, we have the following results.
Lemma 4: For any three points P, P

and P

on

XX

satisfying P < P

< P

,

XX

is distance-continuous if and
only if ||PP

|| < ||PP

|| holds.
From Lemma 4, the following Corollary can be easily
obtained.
Corollary 2: Assume that

XX

is distance-continuous. For
any four points P, P

, P

and P

on

XX

satisfying P <
P

< P

< P

, we have ||PP

|| > ||P

||.
With the concept of distance-continuous, we may wonder
if any curve is distance-continuous. Fortunately, with Lemma
4, we can identify a class of distance-continuous curves.
Property 2:

XX

is distance-continuous if

XX

is a semi-
circle with the start point X and end point X

. Furthermore,
denote by the region enclosed by

XX

and line segment

XX

. Let

XGX

be an arbitrary convex curve in region .

Then

XGX

is distance-continuous.
B. The Case When

AB is Distance-continuous
For a given deployment scheme T = {T
1
, T
2
, , T
n
},
draw line segments connecting T
1
T
2
, T
2
T
3
, , T
n1
T
n
, se-
quentially. For line segment T
i
T
i+1
, i = 1, 2, , n1, draw
its midperpendicular, which intersects with curve

T
i
T
i+1
at
point H
i
1
. Let H
0
= A and H
n
= B. For any deploy-
ment T, H
i
, i = 0, 1, , n, can be uniquely determined.
Denote the largest distance between T
i
and curve

H
i1
H
i
by

D(T
i
,

H
i1
H
i
), i = 1, , n.
With the distance-continuous property, i is the nearest
sensor to the points on curve

H
i1
H
i
. The vulnerability
of curve

H
i1
H
i
is independent of other sensor j, j =
1
The midperpendicular may intersect with

AB at other point, we only

consider the intersection point on curve

T
i
T
i+1
i, j = 1, 2, , n. In addition, ||H
i1
T
i
|| ||PT
i
||, P

H
i1
T
i
, and ||T
i
H
i
|| ||T
i
P||, P

T
i
H
i
. Therefore,
V(

AB) = max
i
V(

H
i1
H
i
) = max
i

D(T
i
,

H
i1
H
i
)/, where

D(T
i
,

H
i1
H
i
) = max{||H
i1
T
i
||, ||T
i
H
i
||}. In view of this,

H
i1
H
i
is dened as sensor is effective detection curve
and

D(T
i
,

H
i1
H
i
) the effective detection range. Obviously,
sensor is effective detection curve and range are determined
by a specic deployment.
We design the Curve-based Sensor Deployment when the
deployment curve

AB is Distance-Continuous (CSD-DC) in
the following.
Algorithm 1: Deploy sensors on curve

AB such that

D(T
i
,

H
i1
H
i
) = ||H
i1
T
i
|| = ||T
i
H
i
||, (1)

D(T
i
,

H
i1
H
i
) =

D(T
j
,

H
j1
H
j
), (2)
for any i, j = 1, 2, , n.
The following result gives the existence of the sensor
deployment according to Algorithm 1.
Lemma 5: Algorithm 1 can always nd a feasible deploy-
ment T = {T
1
, T
2
, , T
n
}.
The proof (refer to [10]) of Lemma 5 provides a way to nd
the deployment designed by Algorithm 1. The performance of
Algorithm 1 is given in the following theorem.
Theorem 3: The algorithm 1 obtains the optimal deploy-
ment when

AB is distance-continuous.
C. The Case When

AB is not Distance-continuous
When

AB is not distance-continuous, points in Z(P, d),
P

AB, d 0, are probably not connected. Placing a sensor
on a point of the curve

AB can cover several disconnected
sub-curves. To obtain an optimal deployment, we have to try
every possible combination of locations of n sensors, which is
computationally impossible. Hence, in this section, we focus
on providing an approximation algorithm with theoretical
bound.
Algorithm 2: Deploy sensors on curve

AB such that
||

T
i1
T
i
|| = ||

T
j1
T
j
|| = 2||

T
0
T
1
|| = 2||

T
n
T
n+1
||, i, j =
2, , n, where A = T
0
< T
1
< < T
n+1
= B.
Before showing the performance of Algorithm 2, we give
the following Lemma 6.
Lemma 6: Assume XX

and X

are two connected

line segments and XX

= 90

. The vulnerability of

XX

is lower-bounded by V(

XX

X)
||

XX

||
(2n+

21)
,
where

XX

= XX

.
Draw a semicircle centered at the middle point of AB with
a radius of ||AB||/2. From Property 2,

is the region
enclosed by AB and

AB) can not be included by the region
enclosed by AB and the semicircle since

AB is not distance-
continuous. Then, one of the following conditions must hold:
i)

AB intersects with the semicircle, and ii)

contains the
semicircle. Hence, we can always nd a point G in the region

such that AGB = 90

. Denote AG GB by

AGB, as
illustrated in Fig. 4. We have the following results.
473
Theorem 4: When curve

AB is not distance-continuous, the
approximation ratio of the vulnerability corresponding to the
deployment by the Algorithm 2 to that by the optimal one is
upper-bounded by
D
T
(

AB)
D
T
(

AB)
min

,
||

AB||
||

AGB||
2n+

21
2n

.
A B
1
7
2
7
1 Q
7

Q
7
1
' 7
2
' 7
1
'
Q
7

'
Q
7
; ' ;
<
' <
A B
<
' <
'' <
*
B
Fig. 4. An illustration of Theorem 4.
V. NUMERICAL RESULTS
In what follows, we give some numerical results to validate
our analysis.
We will use function f(x) = x
2
, x [100, 100], under
different values of to yield deployment curves: i) = 0.01
(denoted by curve 1), ii) = 0.012 (denoted by curve 2),
iii) = 0.014 (denoted by curve 3), iv) = 0.02 (denoted
by curve 4), v) = 0.022 (denoted by curve 5), and vi)
= 0.024 (denoted by curve 6) in our simulations. For any
x
1
[100, 0], let (x) = (x
1
x)
2
+(x
2
1
x
2
)
2
, x x
1
.
It is easy to verify that
(x)
x
> 0, for any x
1
[100, 0]
when = 0.01, 0.012, 0.014. Then, for any x
1
[100, 0],
and x
1
< x
2
< x
3
100, we have ||x
1
x
2
|| < ||x
1
x
3
||.
As curve 1 is symmetrical, the conclusion holds when x
1

[0, 100]. Therefore, curves 1, 2, and 3 are distance-continuous.
Similarly, we can show curves 4, 5, and 6 are not distance-
continuous.
We rst vary the available number of sensors n from 3 to
10, and apply algorithm 1 to deploy sensors on curves 1, 2,
and 3. We plot in the Fig. 5(a) the vulnerability of the curves
1, 2, and 3 under the deployment obtained by Algorithm 1.
The values of vulnerability decrease with the increase of the
number of sensors. We also use Algorithm 2 to deploy sensors
on non-distance-continuous curves 4, 5, and 6, and the results
are also plotted in Fig. 5(a).
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
20
40
60
80
100
The number of sensor (n)
V
u
l
n
e
r
a
b
i
l
i
t
y

1
= 0.01

2
= 0.012

3
= 0.014

4
= 0.02

5
= 0.022

6
= 0.024
(a) Vulnerability of curve 1-6 under
different n.
2 4 6 8 10
10
20
30
40
50
60
The number of sensor (n)
V
u
l
n
e
r
a
b
i
l
i
t
y
Optimal deployment curve
Deployment line 1
Deployment line 2
Deployment line 3
(b) Comparisons of curve-based
approach with line-based approach.
Fig. 5. Numerical results.
Finally, we discuss the advantages of curve-based approach
over line-based approach. As discussed in the Sec. III, line-
based deployment is suboptimal when ||C|| < ||EF||. This
means the existing line-based deployment will nd a line
segment with larger length than what we nd in the curve-
based deployment. Assume curve 1 is the optimal deployment
curve found by curve-based approach, whose length is 295.78,
and the length of the shortest line segments found by different
line-based approaches are 305.78 (denoted by deployment line
1), 315.78 (denoted by deployment line 2) and 325.78 (denoted
by deployment line 3), respectively. We show the values of
vulnerability of curve 1 under the Algorithm 1 and deployment
lines 1-3 by line-based approach in the Fig. 5(b). Algorithm
1 has better performance than that by line-based approach.
The larger ||EF|| ||C||, the better performance curve-based
approach would obtain.
VI. CONCLUSION
This work studied sensor deployment for barrier coverage
in wireless sensor networks. We are interested in answering
three fundamental questions: 1) Is line-based approach always
optimal? 2) If not, can we nd the optimal deployment curve?
3) how to design sensors on the optimal deployment curve
to enhance barrier coverage performance? We rst showed
the suboptimality of line-based deployment when the length
of shortest deployment line segment is larger than that of
shortest deployment curve, and for the rst time quantied
the need of curve-based deployment. Finding the optimal
deployment curve is highly non-trivial due to the arbitrary
deployment region. We obtained a sufcient condition for the
deployment curve to be optimal, which gives an answer to
second question. To address the third question, we introduced
a concept of distance-continuous function, and provided an
algorithm to obtain the optimal sensor deployment when the
deployment curve is distance-continuous, and an algorithm
which can attain close-to-optimal sensor deployment when
the deployment curve is not. Numerical results have been
performed to validate our conclusions.
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