Performance Study for Coverage Control Protocols under Ranging and Localization Errors in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Coverage is an important performance metric for many applications 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 operation time. Many coverage control protocols have been proposed and can be classified into three types based on whether the nodes´ locations or distances are known. This paper uses simulations to study the performance of coverage control protocols when there are errors in nodes´ distances and locations. The simulation results suggest that in a large-scale sensor network with ranging-/localization-errors,the performance of the distance- and location-based coverage control protocols normally degrade much and sometimes their performance are even worse than those distance- and location-free coverage control protocols.