WSN04-5: Coverage-Preserving Routing Protocols for Randomly Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensing coverage is one of the most important issues for sensor networks. Since some nodes may become invalid after they have used up their own energy resource, the achievable sensing coverage will gradually degrade as time passes. Different routing protocols may motivate different distributions of energy dissipation among nodes, and thus induce different changes in the network topology after some nodes have died out. This implies that different routing protocols will lead to different sensing coverage when some nodes are no longer available. Considering the impact on the sensing coverage of a network, we have proposed coverage-preserving routing protocols modified from the LEACH and virtual grid routing protocols. These proposed protocols can substantially improve the performance of sensing coverage. According to the simulation results, a gain of 20% in overall sensing coverage can be obtained for the time duration maintaining the network coverage over 50%.