LSEA: Light Weight Sector Eligibility Algorithm for k-Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, preserving sensing k-coverage with energy constraint is a basic issue drawing increasing attentions. In fact, the k-coverage configuration is extensively exploited to ensure that each location is covered by at least k active sensor nodes. However, most of these algorithms incur several drawbacks like: i) The need of a global view of the monitored field ii) Redundant sensor occurrence, and iii) Considerably high computation cost. We propose, in this paper, (LSEA) a distributed Lightweight Sector Eligibility Algorithm that settles all of the above critical problems and prove that a monitored area is k-covered with very low cost. LSEA proves that whether a sensor is eligible to sleep (redundant) or stay active can be accurately determined by simply checking if its neighbours belong to a well known set of points within its sensing range (Flower Area). LSEA has a computational complexity of O(N), where N is the number of neighboring nodes, lower than the complexity of many other eligibility algorithms. Simulation results confirm the theoretical analysis.