Probabilistic Self-Scheduling for Coverage Configuration in Sensor Networks

Sensing coverage is a critical issue in sensor network deployments. We propose a novel scheme to maintain the sensing coverage in sensor networks, which we call CASS (Coverage-Aware Self-Scheduling). Different from the existing work on coverage maintenance, CASS probabilistically schedules a sensor’s sensing activities according to the sensor’s contribution to the sensing coverage. CASS is designed to allow sensors with higher coverage contribution to have more chance to be active. In this way, CASS reduces the number of active sensors to maintain certain coverage. Besides the sensing coverage, the connectivity of the network topologies is required for the purposes of communicating among sensors to collect sensing data. Therefore, we describe a generic unifying framework to incorporate different connectivity and coverage maintenance schemes. Simulations are carried out under the framework by integrating CASS with LEACH (the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy). Simulation results show that CASS can considerably improve the energy efficiency of a sensor network with low overhead.