Evaluating coverage quality through best covered pathes in wireless sensor networks

Coverage quality is one critical metric to evaluate the Quality of Service (QoS) provided by wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we address maximum support coverage problem (a.k.a. best case coverage) in wireless sensor networks. Most of the existing work assume that the coverage degree is 1, i.e. every point on the resultant path should fall within the sensing range of at least one sensor node. Here we study the k-coverage problem, in which every point on the resultant path is covered by at least k sensors while optimizing certain objectives. We present tackle this problem under both centralized and distributed setting. The time complexity is bounded by O(k² n log n) where n is the number of deployed sensor nodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that presents polynomial time algorithms that find optimal k-support paths for a general k.