Approximation Algorithms for Sensor Deployment

We develop an integer linear programming formulation to find the minimum cost deployment of sensors that provides the desired coverage of a target point set and propose a greedy heuristic for this problem. Our formulation permits heterogeneous multimodal sensors and is extended easily to account for nonuniform sensor detection resulting from blockages, noise, fading, and so on. A greedy algorithm for solving the proposed general ILP is developed. Additionally, isin-approximation algorithms and a polynomial- time approximation scheme are proposed for the case of grid coverage. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithms over earlier algorithms for point coverage of grids by using heterogeneous sensors.