Scheduling Sensor Activity for Point Information Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

An important application of wireless sensor networks is to perform the monitoring missions, for example, to monitor some targets of interests at all times. Sensors are often equipped with non-rechargeable batteries with limited energy and energy saving is a critical aspect for wireless sensor networks. If a target is monitored simultaneously by serval sensors, some of them can be switched off to save energy without causing mission failure and by which their operational times as well as the network lifetime can be prolonged. In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling sensor activity to cover a set of targets with known locations such that all targets can be monitored all the time and the network can operate as long as possible. A solution to this scheduling problem is to partition all sensors into sensor covers such that each cover can monitor all targets and the covers are activated successively. In this paper, we propose to use the notion of information coverage which is based on the estimation theory to exploit the collaborative nature of wireless sensor networks, instead of using the conventional definition of coverage. Due to the use of information coverage, a target that is not within the sensing disk of any single sensor can still be considered to be monitored (information covered) by the cooperation of more than one sensor.