Location-free Minimum Coverage Determination in a Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network

The minimum connected cover problem is one of the most fundamental issues in wireless sensor networks, which directly affects the capability and efficiency of the wireless sensor network (WSN). Constructing a minimum connected coverage has a great relevance for network services, such as prolonged system lifetime by utilizing redundant deployment of sensor nodes where the main challenge in the design of sensor networks is the limited battery power of the sensors and the difficulty of replacing and/or recharging these batteries. Thus, it is necessary that the sensors be densely deployed and energy-efficient protocols be designed to maximize the network lifetime while meeting the specific application requirements in terms of coverage and connectivity. In this paper, we propose a new distributed algorithm to find the minimum connected cover of the queried region by discovering the redundant sensors for heterogeneous sensors, each with arbitrary sensing range and is not aware of its location or relative direction of its neighbor. We provide performance metrics to analyze the performance of our approach and the simulation results show that our approach clearly improves the network lifetime over existing algorithms. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).