An energy-efficient coverage hole detection technique for randomly deployed wireless senor networks

Achieving full sensing coverage is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks applications such as military surveillance and environmental monitoring. In such applications, a large number of sensors are randomly deployed with helicopter passing over the area of interest. This method of deployment is the main reason for the emergence of holes in the deployed network. These holes have its effect on the performance of the applications. Therefore, it should be detected well regardless of its size or location. Many techniques were proposed to solve the problem of coverage hole detection. The performance of all these techniques is affected by a main parameter which is the average node degree measured by the nodes in the network. Researchers always tend to reduce this value. Reducing the average node degree helps in decreasing the communication cost of the detection protocol. In this paper, we propose a distributed energy-efficient coverage hole detection technique with average node degree equal 3 in most cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the least value among all other previously proposed techniques.