Abstract
Oil tanks monitoring is an important problem in the field of oil production. Tanks might be distributed in large areas and dedicated people might be assigned for each tank to monitor it in terms of its temperature, the surrounding area, and even the level of oil inside. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) could be one of the best solutions to this problem. The problem of these tanks is that they are far from each other and they might have obstacles among them that block the sensors' signals. At the same time, WSN consists of many low-cost nodes with limited power and communication. In addition, these sensors are either randomly deployed in the monitored field or deterministically installed in specific places. In both cases, gaps may appear in the network leaving uncovered areas/tanks. In this paper it is improved the connectivity of the network used for oil tanks monitoring by adding minimum number of relay nodes to it. To solve the problem of oil tanks monitoring by using WSN are used the following algorithms: the Divided Network Area Algorithm (DNAA) by dividing the network area to small squares and connecting theses small areas; the Best Path Algorithm (BPA) by making the network connected when selecting the best path for all sensors and guarantee that all nodes are connected; and the Adjustable Communication Range with Best Path Algorithm (ACR-BPA) working with both the communication ranges and the network paths. With different problem settings, the proposed algorithms are examined and compared to a state-of-art greedy algorithm.