Energy-Aware Clustering and Sensor Scheduling Coverage Maintenance for Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the fundamental challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the coverage problem that consists in observing continuously and effectively a geographical area. To solve this problem, several protocols use the sensor activity scheduling mechanism that consists on turning off redundant sensors while maintaining coverage by the remaining active nodes. In this paper, we propose an efficient protocol based on network clustering and sensor activity scheduling to maintain coverage, called ECSSCoM (Energy-aware Clustering Sensor Scheduling Coverage Maintenance). The proposed protocol does not require sensors´ locations information, it divides the network lifetime into activity rounds. In each round a small number of active nodes (cluster-heads and members) is selected to ensure coverage. The nodes selection is based on the computation of a timeout according to the local information (energy and node degree). Compared with some existing protocols, simulation results show that ECSSCoM is very competitive by achieving a high coverage ratio with reduced energy consumption.