Improving Lifetime and Coverage through Mobile Beacon for High Density Sensor Networks

The expected lifetime of any wireless sensor network is a critical issue as sensor nodes are powered by small batteries. One effective approach for energy conservation, especially in high density networks, consists on switching alternatively nodes in sleep/active modes, while ensuring at the same time continuous monitoring (i.e., coverage and connectivity). In this paper we propose a novel approach to achieve energy savings by organizing the sensor nodes into disjoint sets (rounds) which are activated successively. The key idea behind our approach is to exploit a mobile beacon, primarily used to localization purposes, to additionally constructs sets of actives nodes. The simulation results we obtained validated the effectiveness of our approach in comparison to existing ones.