Joint deployment strategy of battery-free sensor networks with coverage guarantee

The energy limitation of wireless sensors limits the lifetime of the traditional wireless sensor networks. The Battery-Free Sensor Network (BF-WSN) is a new network architecture proposed in recent years to address the limitation of wireless sensor networks. In a BF-WSN, the battery-free node can harvest energy from the ambient environment, and thus the lifetime of a BF-WSN is unlimited in terms of energy. The coverage quality is an important measurement of BF-WSNs. Considering the specific features of BF-WSNs, we propose a new deployment concept for BF-WSNs, named Joint Deployment. It aims to determine the locations and working schedules of sensor nodes to maximize network coverage quality. Based on the joint deployment concept, we propose a new deployment problem of battery-free sensor nodes. We prove that this problem is at least NP-Hard. We also analyze the upper bound of this problem. Furthermore, we propose an approximated algorithm to solve this problem and analyze the time complexity and the ratio bound of the algorithm. Extensive simulations are carried out to examine the performance of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results show that the algorithm is efficient and effective. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.