Energy-Efficient Barrier Lifetime Prolonging Scheme Based on Repairing in Directional Sensor Networks

As the sensor nodes have quite limited battery capacity and their energies are not renewable, the barrier hole appears once one node in the barrier runs out of its energy. Barrier hole repairing is necessary to effectively extend the lifetime of barrier coverage in directional sensor networks (DSNs). This article studies the design of effective barrier-hole-repairing scheme for DSNs. Specifically, it first presents the important concept of the repairing region (RepR), inside which the mobile nodes located can repair the hole only by rotating their sensing directions. Then it analyzes the movement and rotation energy consumption of different types of candidate repairing nodes which are not in the barrier. Finally, based on the above analysis, it proposes an effective scheme to schedule an optimal node to repair the barrier hole with the minimum energy consumption, fully exploiting residual resources (unused nodes and power) to increase network service time. Simulation results show that, compared to other barrier-hole-repairing schemes, our scheme could greatly prolong the lifetime of barrier coverage.