Optimal Receiver Placement for K-barrier Coverage in Passive Bistatic Radar Sensor Networks

The improvement of coverage quality in the construction of multiple-barrier coverage is a critical problem in a wireless sensor network. In this article, we investigate the K-barrier coverage construction problem in passive bistatic radar sensor networks. In contrast to traditional bistatic radar networks, the transmitters in a passive bistatic radar network are predeployed and noncooperative. To construct K barriers, we need to deploy receivers that couple with predeployed transmitters to build continuous barriers. In this work, we focus on the minimum number of receivers problem of constructing K-barrier coverage, where the minimum number of receivers is based on the predeployed transmitters. To handle this problem, we first investigate the optimal placement of receivers between adjacent transmitters for a sub-barrier formation and then determine the optimal placement of receivers for the one-barrier construction. For multiple-barrier coverage construction, we introduce a weighted transmitter graph (WTG) to describe the relation among different transmitters, where the weight in the graph is the minimum number of receivers needed for these two transmitters for a sub-barrier formation. Based on WTG, the minimum receivers problem changes to a problem of how to find K-disjoint paths with the minimum total weight in the graph. For large-scale networks, we also propose two efficient heuristic algorithms to solve the corresponding problem. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the correctness and the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.