Connectivity and coverage maintenance in wireless sensor networks

One of the main design challenges for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to obtain long system lifetime without sacrificing system original performance such as communication connectivity and sensing coverage. A large number of sensor nodes are deployed in redundant fashion in dense sensor networks, which lead to higher energy consumption. We propose a distributed framework for energy efficient connectivity and coverage maintenance in WSNs. In our framework, each sensor makes self-scheduling to separately control the states of RF and sensing unit based on dynamic coordinated reconstruction mechanism. A novel energy-balanced distributed connected dominating set algorithm is presented to make connectivity maintenance; and also a distributed node sensing scheduling is brought forward to maintain the network coverage according to the surveillance requirements. We implemented our framework by C++ programming, and the simulation results show that our framework outperforms several related work by considerably improving the energy performance of sensor networks to effectively extend network lifetime.