Confident information coverage hole detection in sensor networks for uranium tailing monitoring

Abstract The wireless sensor networks recently abstract great attention and are used for a wide range of cyber-enabled applications each of which with rigid accuracy requirements. The emergence and existence of coverage holes in WSNs will dramatically degrade the network coverage performance and quality of service. To diminish the negative effects of coverage holes, this paper addresses and studies the confident information coverage hole detection problem (CICHD) based on the proposed novel confident information coverage model (CIC). For solving the CICHD problem, we design two effective heuristic CIC holes detection algorithms including the CHD without considering the nodes residual energy and the other CHDRE taking the nodes’ residual energy into account. In the both proposed algorithms, the sensing field is firstly partitioned into a series of reconstruction grids based on the spatial correlation and correlation range. Then each reconstruction grid will be scanned and detected based on the CIC model to be judged whether it is a hole. Once obtaining the coverage status of every reconstruction grid, the boundary of the coverage hole will be exacted by image processing method. The results of the simulations show that both the proposed schemes can efficiently detect the emerged coverage holes including the locations and the number, and the CHDRE algorithm is more practical and efficient compared to the CHD without considering the energy problem.