Integrating Target Coverage and Connectivity for Wireless Heterogeneous Sensor Networks with Multiple Sensing Units

The paper considers the target coverage and connectivity problem in wireless heterogeneous sensor networks (WHSNs) with multiple sensing units. The paper reduces the problem to a connected set cover problem and further formulates it as integer programming (IP) constraints. Two heuristic but distributed schemes, remaining energy first scheme (REFS) and energy efficient first scheme (EEFS), are proposed to solve the target coverage and connectivity problem. Simulation results show that REFS and EEFS can prolong the network lifetime effectively. Furthermore, EEFS outperforms against REFS in network lifetime.