Coverage Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: Review and Future Directions

The coverage problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be generally defined as a measure of how effectively a network field is monitored by its sensor nodes. This problem has attracted a lot of interest over the years and as a result, many coverage protocols were proposed. In this survey, we first propose a taxonomy for classifying coverage protocols in WSNs. Then, we classify the coverage protocols into three categories (i.e. coverage aware deployment protocols, sleep scheduling protocols for flat networks, and cluster-based sleep scheduling protocols) based on the network stage where the coverage is optimized. For each category, relevant protocols are thoroughly reviewed and classified based on the adopted coverage techniques. Finally, we discuss open issues (and recommend future directions to resolve them) associated with the design of realistic coverage protocols. Issues such as realistic sensing models, realistic energy consumption models, realistic connectivity models and sensor localization are covered

Neighbor Adjacency based Hole Detection Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

AbstractCoverage and communication holes may appear in sensor networks due to limited battery life, presence of obstacles and physical destruction of nodes. These holes have a negative impact on the network performance. In order to ensure that optimum area in sensing field is covered by sensors, coverage holes must be detected. This paper proposes an adaptive routing algorithm based on neighbor adjacency for detecting coverage holes in sensor networks. Proposed algorithm can compute location of holes in the network from remote locations based on hop count measure computed from network statistics. Simulation results show that algorithm gives better performance in terms of end to end delay and packet delivery fraction as compared to previous works. Simplicity and efficiency are the key features that distinguish this work from existing routing and hole detection schemes

Optimal Route Planning with Mobile Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a collection of sensor nodes that sense their surroundings and relay their proximal information for further analysis. They utilize wireless communication technology to allow monitoring areas remotely. A major problem with WSNs is that the sensor nodes have a set sensing radius, which may not cover the entire field space. This issue would lead to an unreliable WSN that sometimes would not discover or report about events taking place in the field space. Researchers have focused on developing techniques for improving area coverage. These include allowing mobile sensor nodes to dynamically move towards coverage holes through the use of a path planning approach to solve issues such as maximizing area coverage. An approach is proposed in this thesis to maximize the area of network coverage by the WSN through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation which utilizes both static and mobile nodes. The mobile nodes are capable of travelling across the area of interest, to cover empty ‘holes’ (i.e. regions not covered by any of the static nodes) in a WSN. The goal is to find successive positions of the mobile node through the network, in order to maximize the network area coverage, or achieve a specified level of coverage while minimizing the number of iterations taken. Simulations of the formulation on small WSNs show promising results in terms of both objectives

ALBAR-H: Load Balancing Around Holes in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks the formation of hole is inevitable because of the structure of the sensor networks. When a hole is formed reliability is decreased. With the formation of holes in sensor networks Quality of service decreases eventually. Network Coverage is an important factor to detect a specified area. In order to maintain the coverage quality of the sensor networks, we propose a light weight protocol, ALBAR-H which is a variant of ALBA-R mechanism to detect localization errors in the sensor networks. In this algorithm , healing is performed with the nodes which are located at a right distance from the hole. Performance results through ns2 show that ALBAR-H shows a better performance by finding the localization errors. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.150713

Finding Perimeter of Query Regions in Heterogenous Wireless Sensor Networks

Some applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) only need to record the information of a target entering or leaving some specific regions of WSNs perimeter. One important issue in this context is to detect the perimeter of the deployed network to ensure that the sensor nodes cover the target area. In this paper we propose two distributed algorithms to elect the perimeter nodes of query regions in a WSN. We consider the most general case, where every sensor has a different sensing radius. We provide performance metrics to analyze the performance of our approach and show by simulation that the proposed algorithms give good performance

A Survey of Coverage Problems in Wireless Sensor Networks

Coverage problem is an important issue in wireless sensor networks, which has a great impact on the performance of wireless sensor networks. Given a sensor network, the coverage problem is to determine how well the sensing field is monitored or tracked by sensors. In this paper, we classify the coverage problem into three categories: area coverage, target coverage, and barrier coverage, give detailed description of different algorithms belong to these three categories. Moreover, we specify the advantages and disadvantages of the existing classic algorithms, which can give a useful direction in this area