Energy-Efficient Heterogeneous WCEP for Enhancing Coverage Lifetime in WSNs

Abstract

The coverage of the monitoring field is the most important issue in geographical regions, traffic, and battlefields. Although the coverage-enhancing clustering algorithms for homogeneous WSNs have been investigated, heterogeneity in context to energy, sensing range, pre-determined deployment scenario, etc., has not been explored. In this paper, heterogeneous weight-based coverage-enhancing protocol (H-WCEP) is proposed that incorporates heterogeneity of sensors in terms of initial energy for load balancing at geographically far away sensors from the sink. The drop in the remaining energy and subsequent decrease in coverage has been overcome by deploying a certain number of higher initial energy sensors in specific areas. Thus, the H-WCEP achieves an increase in the lifetime of the network and full coverage of the monitoring area for a longer time. The simulation results show that H-WCEP outperforms as compare to existing coverage-enhancing clustering algorithms.