Joint k-coverage, duty-cycling, and geographic forwarding in wireless sensor networks

Most of geographic forwarding protocols assume that all sensors are always on. Such an assumption is unrealistic for applications where sensors are switched on or off. This paper focuses on k-covered wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where each point in a field is covered by at least k sensors. First, we characterize k-coverage. Then, we propose an energy-efficient scheduling protocol for k-covered WSNs. Third, we propose the first design of a geographic forwarding protocol for duty-cycled k-covered WSNs with data aggregation. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our joint k-coverage and geographic forwarding protocol and compare it to the Coverage Configuration Protocol (CCP) with BVGF on top of it. Simulation results show that our joint protocol outperforms the resulting protocol, CCP+BVGF.