Distributed self-* minimum connected covering of a query region in sensor networks

Wireless ad-hoc sensor networks are composed of a large number of tiny sensors that have limited resources and yet must form a connected network. A group of sensors is said to cover a certain region when the union of the sensing disks of these sensors completely cover this region. Given a query over a sensor network the minimum connected sensor cover problem is to select a minimum, or nearly minimum, set of sensors such that the selected sensors cover the query region and form a connected network. One proposed solution for the minimum connected sensor cover problem can be to first form a minimum connected dominating set (MCDS), and then to include all sensors in the MCDS in the final cover set. In this paper, we use this approach to present a fully distributed, strictly localized, scalable, self-* solution to the minimum connected sensor cover problem.