Scalable coverage maintenance for dense wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Owing to numerous potential applications, wireless sensor networks have been attracting significant research effort recently. The critical challenge that wireless sensor networks often face is to sustain long-term operation on limited battery energy. Coverage maintenance schemes can effectively prolong network lifetime by selecting and employing a subset of sensors in the network to provide sufficient sensing coverage over a target region. We envision future wireless sensor networks composed of a vast number of miniaturized sensors in exceedingly high density. Therefore, the key issue of coverage maintenance for future sensor networks is the scalability to sensor deployment density. In this paper, we propose a novel coverage maintenance scheme, scalable coverage maintenance (SCOM), which is scalable to sensor deployment density in terms of communication overhead (i.e., number of transmitted and received beacons) and computational complexity (i.e., time and space complexity). In addition, SCOM achieves high energy efficiency and load balancing over different sensors. We have validated our claims through both analysis and simulations.