An optimal coverage-preserving scheme for wireless sensor networks based on local information exchange

Coverage-preserving and energy-saving solutions have been reported in the literature and are generally based upon both quality coverage and off-duty scheme. Off-duty scheme based solutions present at least three challenging problems: (1) keeping coverage and connectivity of the network while optimizing the number of active sensor nodes; (2) resolving conflicts when determining which nodes should be turned off in order to save energy; and (3) finding optimal wake-up strategies that avoid waking up more nodes than necessary. This paper presents a novel distributed solution, the optimal coverage-preserving scheme (OCoPS), that extends the well-known Central Angle Method in order to identify fully sponsored nodes. OCoPS comprises an extended Central Angle Method, new decision algorithms devised to resolve the off-duty conflict problem under different network densities, and an energy-aware wake-up scheme that solves coverage hole problems in off-duty schemes. Compared to the widely used node scheduling scheme, our solution is based on local information exchange without the uncertainty of self-schedule algorithms. OCoPS is implemented as an extension of LEACH. A set of simulation experiments is carried out to evaluate its performance compared to other well-known schemes which are based on the Central Angle Method and self-scheduling. Our results indicate that on network lifetime OCoPS outperforms other schemes by over 20% and by over 25% when the coverage rate is higher than 80%. The experimental results also show that our coverage scheme effectively limits the number of on-duty node compared to the other schemes.