Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks for Area Coverage in Microgrids

Area coverage is a critical issue which will have a major impact on the sensing quality over targeted regions in wireless sensor networks. This paper studies the area coverage problem (ACP) with non-penetrable obstacles in microgrids, where a sensor cannot be deployed or sensing signals cannot pass through. The target coverage region is discretized in a deployment map representation of non-penetrable obstacles. A probability detection model is utilized to represent sensors with a variable distance coverage. The ACP is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem and an iterative process is developed to solve the problem. The microgrid at Illinois Institute of Technology (IL Tech) is used as a practical example. Both the normal and the N-1 contingency deployments of sensors are simulated for optimizing the ACP at the IL Tech microgrid.