A Cooja-Based Tool for Coverage and Lifetime Evaluation in an In-Building Sensor Network

Contiki’s Cooja is a very popular wireless sensor network (WSN) simulator, but it lacks support for modelling sensing coverage, focusing instead on network connectivity and protocol performance. However, in practice, it is the ability of a sensor network to provide a satisfactory level of coverage that defines its ultimate utility for end-users. We introduce WSN-Maintain, a Cooja-based tool for coverage and network lifetime evaluation in an in-building WSN. To extend the network lifetime, but still maintain the required quality of coverage, the tool finds coverage redundant nodes, puts them to sleep and automatically turns them on when active nodes fail and coverage quality decreases. WSN-Maintain together with Cooja allow us to evaluate different approaches to maintain coverage. As use cases to the tool, we implement two redundant node algorithms: greedy-maintain, a centralised algorithm, and local-maintain, a localised algorithm to configure the initial network and to turn on redundant nodes. Using data from five real deployments, we show that our tool with simple redundant node algorithms and reading correlation can improve energy efficiency by putting more nodes to sleep.