An Efficient K-Coverage Eligibility Algorithm on Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are employed in many critical applications. The K-coverage configuration is usually adopted to guarantee the quality of surveillance. A sensor node can be determined to be ineligible to stay active when its sensing range is K-covered. Although many algorithms have been proposed to reduce the complexity of the K-coverage configuration, the accuracy cannot be preserved when the number of deployed sensor nodes increases. In this paper, we propose an efficient K-coverage eligibility (EKE) algorithm to accurately and cheaply determine the eligibility of each sensor node. The algorithm focuses on the regions having a lower degree of coverage for each sensor node. Therefore, the complexity of the EKE algorithm is reduced substantially while retaining accuracy. Experimental studies indicated that the computational cost of the EKE algorithm could be reduced by up to 89% and that the correct percentage was larger than 90%.