DyKCo: Dynamic k-coverage in wireless sensor networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks maintaining complete coverage over an area is one of the fundamental problems. The network must be able to provide the requested coverage while maximizing the network lifetime through scheduling sleep for extraneous nodes. The network should also be able to configure itself to provide different levels of coverage for different applications. In this paper we present DyKCo, a probabilistic method to provide dynamic k-coverage on the area of an event. Our proposed method creates 1-coverage on the whole sensing area and creates k-coverage on the area of a detected event. Our simulations show that we can achieve very high energy savings and high coverage which result in longer network lifetime and higher accuracy. Due to probabilistic nature of our approach it needs much less communication than similar methods to provide k-coverage.