Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks: Deployment strategies and coverage models

Recent advances in sensor technology have enabled remote monitoring of large geographical regions. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are designed to transfer huge amounts of data from one point of the network to others via sensor nodes, which have limited sensing, computation, and communication capabilities. Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs), on the other hand, comprise multiple types of sensor nodes each having different capabilities and specifications. Due to their diverse sensing capabilities against different target types, flexibility in coverage performance, relatively less deployment cost, energy consumption, and improved communication performance, HWSNs have been proven to be very promising in various application domains, such as security, health care, biology, energy, logistics. In this chapter, our main ambition is to give an overview of the basic characteristics of the HWSNs with a focus on the deployment strategies and coverage types with respect to different application areas. For this purpose, we first provide a discussion on the common HWSN application areas and argue on the advantages brought by these networks. Next, we investigate and categorize these networks in terms of deployment strategies. We also provide the basic characteristics of coverage types and problems as well as solution approaches implemented in the literature. We finally evaluate the existing algorithmic solutions and their feasibility along with the limitations and requirements for the future developments.