Sweep line algorithm for k-coverage in wireless sensor networks

Sensing is one of the fundamental functions of wireless sensor networks. Sensor networks are designed to conduct monitoring of physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion, or pollutants, at different locations. Some sensor applications require each point in the region to be covered by multiple sensors (k-coverage) to ensure full Quality of service (QoS) requirements. One way of providing k-coverage in the monitored region, with the purpose of maximizing operational life time of the network without sacrificing QoS, can be achieved by putting redundant nodes into sleep mode in order to reduce the energy consumption across the network. In this paper, we have considered the area coverage problem and proposed a node scheduling algorithm to increase the network life time by putting redundant nodes to sleep mode. In our approach, each node applies the sweep line algorithm to decide the redundancy of it using only single hop information. The time complexity of sweep line is in O (n log n), where n is maximum number of single hop sensing neighbors of a node.