Received January 3, 2021, accepted January 9, 2021, date of publication January 19, 2021, date of current version January 29, 2021. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3052955 A Distributed Surveillance System With Full Coverage Guarantee Using Positive Orthogonal Codes MAAZEN ALSABAAN 1 , WALEED ALSMARY 2 , (Senior Member, IEEE), ABDULAZIZ ALQUNIAH 1,3 , MOHAMED MAHMOUD 4 , (Senior Member, IEEE), AND MAHMOUD NABIL 5 1 Computer Engineering Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia 2 Computer Engineering Department, College of Computer and Information Systems, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah 24381, Saudi Arabia 3 Communication and Information Technology Research Institute, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh 12354, Saudi Arabia 4 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville, TN 38505, USA 5 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina A&T University, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA Corresponding author: Maazen Alsabaan (malsabaan@ksu.edu.sa) This work was supported by the National Plan of Science, Technology and Innovation (MAARIFAH), King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, under Award 15-INF3775-02. ABSTRACT Surveillance systems provide continual coverage of target area(s) using several cameras through different angles. Conventionally, a central unit controls the system by adjusting the coverage rate of the cameras. However, in large-scale environments, such a centralized system is costly and energy inefficient, as the central unit should exchange a lot of control messages with the cameras. Centralized systems also are not resilient because they fail when the central unit is faulty. In this paper, we propose a distributed surveillance system in which each camera independently decides its activation sequence without exchanging control messages while providing guaranteed coverage of the target areas and ensuring a fault-tolerant system. Our goal is to provide full coverage of all target areas with reduced number of activations of each camera to reduce energy consumption and increase the system lifetime in case of wireless camera sensor network (WCSN) where cameras are battery-powered. To achieve that goal, each camera is activated according to positive orthogonal codes (POCs). POCs have been used for medium access control (MAC) in vehicular sensor networks as a distributed solution for medium access to reduce packet collisions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses POCs to create a distributed surveillance system. This work proposes the system design, modeling, and simulation study of a POC-based distributed surveillance system. Moreover, we present a performance evaluation for the coverage percentage and coverage cost metrics using simulations and theoretical analysis. The results indicate that the use of POCs can achieve full coverage of the target areas with a significantly reduced number of cameras compared to a benchmark scheme that uses synchronous fixed repetition (SFR) codes. INDEX TERMS Distributed surveillance, guaranteed coverage, positive orthogonal codes, synchronous fixed repetition. I. INTRODUCTION Wireless camera sensor networks (WCSNs) have gained extensive interest in wireless multimedia sensor net- works (WMSNs) because they enable new applications to the existing wireless sensor network (WSN). One of these applications is video surveillance, which is in high demand in fields ranging from civil applications to highly sensitive mil- itary applications [1]. The challenges and limitations of this technology have been the focus of the research community. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Wei Wei . For example, target coverage is a crucial requirement for surveillance applications in both open areas (e.g., streets) and closed areas (e.g., shopping malls, airports, and hospitals). In surveillance applications, targets must be continuously cov- ered by different cameras through different angles. Currently, wireless cameras are well designed, secure, and efficient. The target coverage problem traditionally aims to optimize the activation of cameras to ensure the full coverage of all targets. One common solution to this problem uses a central- ized unit to control the surveillance system by adjusting the coverage rate of the cameras. However, in large-scale environments, such a centralized system is costly and energy VOLUME 9, 2021 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 16837