Joint energy-balanced and full-coverage mechanism using sensing range control for maximizing network lifetime in WSNs

Coverage is an important issue that has been widely discussed in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, it is still a big challenge to achieve both the purposes of full coverage and energy balancing. This paper considers the area coverage problem for a WSN where each sensor has variable sensing radius. A Weighted Voronoi Diagram (WVD) is proposed as a tool for determining the responsible sensing region of each sensor node according to the remaining energy in a distributed manner. To maximize the network lifetime, techniques for balancing energy consumptions of sensors are further presented. Performance evaluation reveals that the proposed joint energy-balanced and full-coverage mechanism, called EBFC, outperforms the existing studies in terms of network lifetime and degree of energy balancing.