Energy-efficient coverage protocol based on stable and predictive scheduling in wireless sensor networks

One important issue in wireless sensor networks is the area coverage problem. It describes how well a sensing field is supervised by sensors. In fact, an appropriate coverage strategy needs simultaneous activation of a large number of nodes as each location should be covered by at least k sensors, with k > 1 for many applications. Some sensors may be redundant because of overlaps in the nodes' regions. Therefore, scheduling techniques alternate the redundant sensors' activity to reduce uniformly their energy consumption. However, frequent alternation between states and repetitive eligibility executions during the scheduling process itself, lead to significant energy waste. In this paper, we propose the Stable and Predictive Energy-aware Coverage Scheduling (SPEC) protocol. It does not only reduce the scheduling energy waste but it extends the coverage lifetime as well. Indeed, SPEC removes useless transitions from the scheduling strategy and prevents the run of unnecessary eligibility executions. Simulation results confirm that SPEC outperforms existing well-known periodic scheduling protocols, in terms of energy preservation, network lifetime and coverage preservation.