Reliable and Energy Efficient Target Coverage for Wireless Sensor Networks

Department

Computer Science

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-1-2011

Abstract

A critical aspect of applications with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is network lifetime. Power-constrained WSNs are usable as long as they can communicate sense data to a processing node. Poor communication links and hazardous environments make the WSNs unreliable. Existing schemes assume that the state of a sensor covering targets is binary: success (covers the targets) or failure (cannot cover the targets). However, in real WSNs, a sensor covers targets with a certain probability. To improve WSNs' reliability, we should consider that a sensor covers targets with users' satisfied probability. To solve this problem, this paper first introduces a failure probability into the target coverage problem to improve and control the system reliability. Furthermore, we model the solution as the α-Reliable Maximum Sensor Covers (α-RMSC) problem and design a heuristic greedy algorithm that efficiently computes the maximal number of α-Reliable sensor covers. To efficiently extend the WSNs lifetime with users' pre-defined failure probability requirements, only the sensors from the current active sensor cover are responsible for monitoring all targets, while all other sensors are in a low-energy sleep mode. Simulation results validate the performance of this algorithm, in which users can precisely control the system reliability without sacrificing much energy consumption.

Journal Title

Tsinghua Science and Technology

Volume

16

Issue

5

First Page

464

Last Page

474

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1016/S1007-0214(11)70066-9

Share

COinS