EECCP: an energy-efficient coverage- and connectivity preserving algorithm under border effects in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used to monitor the interested region using multi-hop communication. Coverage is a primary metric to evaluate the capacity of monitoring. Connectivity also needs to be guaranteed so that the sink node can receive all sensed data from the region for future processing. In this paper, a connected full/partial coverage problem under border effects is studied. We consider the scenario where the sensor nodes are distributed in a circle-shaped region randomly. First, the network coverage provided by N nodes is derived by the mathematical expression exactly. Then the lower bound of the network connectivity probability is also derived. Since nodes are equipped with energy-limited batteries, energy conservation in such networks is of paramount importance to prolong the network lifetime. Accordingly, we propose a location-independent, energy-efficient data routing algorithm EECCP which considers the network coverage and sensor connectivity simultaneously. Compared with other related algorithms, the extensive simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve the connected, full/partial coverage requirement.