Coordinated sensor deployment for improving secure communications and sensing coverage

Sensor network has a great potential in applications such as habitat monitoring, wildlife tracking, building surveillance, and military combat. The design of a sensor network system involves several important issues, including the sensing coverage, node-to-node or node-to-base-station communications, and the security in information gathering and relay by the sensors. In this paper, we show that the system performance on these aspects depends closely on how the sensors are deployed in the field, and on how the sensor locations can be adjusted after the initial deployment. For static sensor deployment, we investigate the hexagon and square lattice topology and analyze their impact on secure connectivity and sensing coverage. For advanced sensing devices that allow for location adjustment after deployment, we have established a new framework for coordinated updates of sensor locations. We propose two new sensor location updating algorithms, the VFSec and the Weighted Centroid algorithm, to jointly optimize sensing coverage and secure connectivity. Simulation results show that these new algorithms provide superior tradeoff over the existing approaches that do not take security into considerations.