Balanced Energy and Coverage Guaranteed Protocol

for Wireless Sensor Networks

Nam Tuan Le
*
, Nirzhar Saha, Ratan Kumar Mondal, Sunghun Chae, and Yeong Min Jang

Dept of Electronics Engineering
Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea
E-mail:

yjang@kookmin.ac.kr

AbstractWireless platforms are becoming less expensive
and more powerful, enabling the promise of widespread
use, everything from health monitoring to military sensing.
In large scale applications like military surveillance,
sensing coverage is essential for target detection and
optimization of power consumption is important for
lifetime extension of the network. Coverage and long
lifetime network are two important factors and challenges
for sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a new
scheme, named as BECG, which remains the best coverage
of the sensing area and energy balanced scheduling for all
sensors. It allows nodes to determine when they can switch
to sleep mode during operation. The energy efficiency of
the proposed scheme is shown by intelligent decisions
making. Each node in the network takes decision to turn
on or turn off in a distributed manner that results a set of
small number of active nodes throughout the lifetime of
the network and covers sensing area of interest for target
detection. It reduces redundancy, power consumption and
increase the lifetime of a network. At first we applied our
algorithm for a random topology and then we evaluate the
performance of the network by simulation.

Keywords Sensor Network, MAC protocol, Power efficiency,
Coverage.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless sensor network is an emerging network technology
in this century. Its emergence brings a new phase in the
development and low cost sensor motes large scale
applications of wireless sensor network such as monitoring of
climate or animal/plant habitation, tracking of targets in the
battlefield, and observing buildings or infrastructures for
defense. In general, sensor nodes are operated by a small
battery that has a limited amount of energy. Moreover, since
the region where sensor nodes are deployed is usually
dangerous and inhospitable terrain, the battery of the sensor
node cannot be easily recharged or replaced. Therefore, in
wireless sensor networks, reducing energy consumption of
each sensor node is one of the important issues to prolong the
network lifetime. Under such battery-based constraints with
limited power supply, energy consumption is a key issue for
designing sensor network applications. Some sensor products
adopt an IEEE 802.11-like MAC protocol. However, IEEE
802.11MAC is not a good solution for sensor networks. S-
MAC (sensor MAC) proposes enhanced schemes, such as
periodic sleep and overhearing avoidance, to provide a better
choice for sensor applications.
For military sensor network applications, power
conservation and the quality of surveillance are two
conflicting requirements of target detection in sensor networks.
With unlimited power supply, a given area can be monitored
perfectly with a set of sensor nodes that cover the entire area
in terms of sensing. However, since the sensor nodes have
limited power, the quality of monitoring becomes inversely
proportional to the lifetime of the network. The coverage of a
region of interest is very important for monitoring and target
detection. Uniform deployment in the military field is
impossible because of inaccessibility of human. So, sensors
are deployed in the military field using unmanned vehicle or
helicopter. It resembles to be randomly distributed. This
distribution leads to overlapping sensing areas for some
regions and some regions are out of coverage. To assure the
coverage in the whole area of interest, it needs to deploy the
nodes for two or three times or densely for one time. Besides
fault-tolerance, the highly dense nodes can increase the
information precision and collision. It decreases network's
lifetime. In such dense networks, energy-efficient scheduling
is a key factor to extend the functionality and the lifetime of
the network. The fundamental challenge of scheduling is to
maximize the number of sleeping nodes to conserve more
energy while maintaining the coverage of the WSN.
There are several approaches which try to solve these
problems. One important concern on network survivability is
energy balance. If sensor nodes consume energy more equally,
the chance that some nodes use up their energy much earlier
and therefore the network is partitioned becomes lower. So,
the question arises, if the network is made dense to get the
coverage, how it is possible to find out a minimum set of
nodes in a distributed manner to fulfill the coverage
requirement and to turn off other nodes to increase the
network lifetime. And how turning on and turning off
scheduling can be made among the nodes so that all the nodes
will maintain the coverage as well as balance the energy
consumption among nodes.
2013 International Conference on Electrical Information and Communication Technology (EICT)
978-1-4799-2299-4/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE