An energy-aware coverage control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Sensing coverage and energy consumption are two primary issues in wireless sensor networks. Sensing coverage is closely related to network energy consumption. The performance of a sensor network depends to a large extent on the sensing coverage, and its lifetime is determined by its energy consumption. In this paper, an energy-aware location-independent coverage control protocol for wireless sensor networks (EACCP) is proposed. EACCP can achieve a good performance in terms of sensing coverage, lifetime by minimizing energy consumption for control overhead, and balancing the energy load among all nodes. Adopting the hierarchical clustering idea, EACCP elects the working nodes based on the average residual energy of neighbouring nodes and its own residual energy parameters. Our simulation study and analysis demonstrate that EACCP not only provide the high quality of sensing coverage, but also has the good performance in the energy efficiency. In addition, EACCP can better adapt the applications with the great heterogeneous energy capacities in the sensor networks, as well as effectively reduce the control overhead.