Energy-efficient connected coverage of discrete targets in wireless sensor networks

A major concern in wireless sensor networks is to maximize network lifetime (in terms of rounds) while maintaining a high quality of services (QoS) at each round such as target coverage and network connectivity. Due to the power scarcity of sensors, a mechanism that can efficiently utilize energy has a great impact on extending network lifetime. Most existing works concentrate on scheduling sensors between sleep and active modes to maximize network lifetime while maintaining target/area coverage and network connectivity. This paper generalizes the sleep/active mode by adjusting sensing range to maximize total number of rounds and presents a distributed heuristic to address this problem.