Path diversity in energy-efficient wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency is one of the most important issue to be tackled in wireless sensor networks. Activity scheduling protocols aim at prolonging the network lifetime by reducing the proportion of nodes that participate in the application. Among the vast range of criteria existing to schedule nodes activities, area coverage by connected sets is one of the most studied. Active nodes must ensure area coverage while remaining connected in order to guarantee proper data collection to the sink stations. As wireless communications stand for the main source of energy consumption, we investigated the communication redundancy of the active nodes set. We define a path diversity based metric that allows to characterize the communication redundancy of a given set of nodes. We show that one of the most used connectivity criterion is far from building minimal connected sets in terms of communicating nodes involved. Our results open new directions to design localized connected sets solutions.