Partial Coverage in Homological Sensor Networks

We present a solid study on the performance of a homological sensor network in partial sensing coverage, which means the network has at least one sensing coverage hole and we demonstrate that when sacrificing a little coverage the system lifetime can be prolonged significantly. In particular, we showed that when there is one sensing coverage hole (with a coverage rate of 97%) the system lifetime can be extended to 3-7 times compared with a full coverage strategy which gives a system lifetime increase with 1.2-3 times only. An algebraic topology tool, homology group, is used in our work to calculate sensing coverage of a sensor network. Unlike other approaches, our method does not need any node location or orientation information and it does not have any assumption about the code deployment control and domain geometry either. The only thing needed to calculate sensing coverage is a node to node communication graph.