Layered Diffusion-based Coverage Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

Coverage is an important performance metric for many applications, such as surveillance in wireless sensor networks. Coverage control is used to select as few active nodes as possible from all deployed sensor nodes, such that sufficient coverage of the monitored area can be guaranteed while reducing the energy consumption of each individual sensor node to prolong the network lifetime. This paper classifies three types of coverage control protocols based on the available information about nodes’ distances or locations, and reviews several representative protocols for each type. We also propose a new distributed and localized coverage control protocol, called Layered Diffusion-based Coverage Control (LDCC). The LDCC protocol does not require information about the node location coordinates when selecting active nodes. Instead, it exploits hop count information, which is easily obtained in a WSN, to select active sensor nodes. Furthermore, the LDCC protocol is very simple and does not require any sophisticated computation such as distance or covered area computation. Our simulation results show that the LDCC protocol achieves a high coverage ratio while incurring very low message overhead compared with other existing protocols. Furthermore, simulation results suggest that in a large-scale sensor network with medium to large localization errors, LDCC performs even better than location-based coverage control protocols.