On demand k-coverage with purposeful mobility in wireless sensor networks

Energy-efficient and cheap deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is always desirable but a challenging problem. Achieving K-covering is a very critical issue in the design of energy-efficient WSNs. It becomes more challenging in mission-oriented WSNs, where sensors have to move in order to k-cover a region of interest in the field and get placed in proper location to completely k-cover the region of interest. In this paper, our main focus is on achieving a k-coverage network which is energy efficient. We try to distribute the workload on the sensors in order to achieve longer network lifetime. We use two different protocols namely, centralized 4-way communication and local selection for selecting the appropriate mobile sensors that will take part in sensing. Mathematical proofs and simulation results show that our model of energy efficient k-coverage outperforms an existing one in terms of size of k-coverage and the number of deploy-able sensors along with their total energy consumption.