Wireless sensor networks are made up of a large number of sensors deployed randomly in an ad-hoc manner in the area/target to be monitored. Due to their weight and size limitations, the energy conservation is the most critical issue. Energy saving in a wireless sensor network can be achieved by scheduling a subset of sensor nodes to activate and allowing others to go into low power sleep mode, or adjusting the transmission or sensing range of wireless sensor nodes. In this thesis, we focus on improving the lifetime of wireless sensor networks using both smart scheduling and adjusting sensing ranges. Firstly, we conduct a survey on existing works in literature and then we define the sensor network lifetime problem with range assignment. We then propose two completely localized and distributed scheduling algorithms with adjustable sensing range. These algorithms are the enhancement of distributed algorithms for fixed sensing range proposed in the literature. The simulation results show that there is almost 20 percent improvement of network lifetime when compare with the previous approaches
