Energy-Efficient Area Coverage in Heterogeneous Energy Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensing coverage and energy consumption are two primary issues in wireless sensor networks. The performance of a sensor network depends to a large extent on the sensing coverage, and its lifetime is determined by its energy consumption. In real- world applications, it is unrealistic to guarantee all sensors have the same energy because they have different energy consumption. Moreover, sensors redeployment also results in the heterogeneous energy capacities. In this paper, an energy-efficient area coverage protocol for heterogeneous energy sensor networks (ACHE) is proposed. ACHE can achieve a good performance in terms of sensing area coverage, lifetime by minimizing energy consumption for control overhead, and balancing the energy load among all nodes. Adopting the hierarchical clustering idea, ACHE elects the active nodes based on the average residual energy of neighboring nodes and its own residual energy parameters. Our simulation study and analysis demonstrate that ACHE not only provide the high quality of sensing coverage, but also has the good performance in the energy efficiency. In addition, ACHE can better adapt the applications with the great heterogeneous energy capacities in the sensor networks.