A Cluster-Based Coverage-Preserved Scheduling Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of a number of low-power, small-scale sensors with limited processing and communication capabilities. Such networks are usually applied to gather data from interested area or specific environment and deliver to remote users for analyzing or monitoring. Since the sensing devices are usually powered by battery, it is a great challenge to meet the requirement of long system lifetime for various applications with limited energy. In recent researches, coverage preserved scheduling scheme has been proposed to conserve energy and provide sensing quality. In the densely deployed sensor networks, the areas or data that are sensed by neighboring sensors may overlap. By selecting appropriate sensors into sleep state, the system lifetime can be extended without losing coverage. In this paper, we propose a distributed cluster-based coverage-preserved scheduling scheme. We divide sensors into clusters and group cluster members into sponsor sets based on neighbor information. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach distributes the workloads among sponsor sets, ensures sufficient coverage and prolongs the system lifetime.