Distributed and stable energy-efficient scheduling algorithm for coverage in wireless sensor networks

Minimizing the energy consumption of battery-powered sensors is an essential consideration in sensor network applications like coverage, and sleep/wake scheduling mechanism has been proved to an efficient approach to handling this issue. Nevertheless, the frequent switching between states, during scheduling, leads also to significant energy consumption. In this article, a coverage-guaranteed distributed sleep/wake scheduling scheme is presented with the purpose of prolonging network lifetime while guaranteeing network coverage. Our scheme mitigates scheduling process to be more stable by avoiding useless transitions between states without affecting the coverage level required by the application. The simulation results illustrate that out scheme outperforms some other existed algorithms in terms of coverage guarantee, energy conservation and stability.