A practical coverage algorithm for wireless sensor networks in real terrain surface

Large-scale sensor deployment and coverage of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the most important topics for real applications, especially on real terrain surface, such as forest monitoring. In our works, we exploit the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) in Geographic Information System to describe the real fields for sensors. An algorithm for sensor deployment is proposed to generate the location of each sensor on real terrain surface. However, the usage of grid DEM makes the algorithm more complicated in practice, especially the calculation of geodesic. To optimise the calculation, we present a genetic method to solve the new issue and make our method practical. The experiments with real data show that our algorithm is practical, considering time and complexity to get k-coverage of sensors in real terrain surface.