Coverage and Connectivity in Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks for Event Monitoring

In duty-cycled wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for stochastic event monitoring, existing efforts are mainly concentrated on energy-efficient scheduling of sensor nodes to guarantee the coverage performance, ignoring another crucial issue of connectivity. The connectivity problem is extremely challenging in the duty-cycled WSNs due to the fact that the link connections between nodes are transient thus unstable. In this paper, we propose a new kind of network, partitioned synchronous network, to jointly address the coverage and connectivity problem. We analyze the coverage and connectivity performances of partitioned synchronous network and compare them with those of existing asynchronous network. We perform extensive simulations to demonstrate that the proposed partitioned synchronous network has a better connectivity performance than that of asynchronous network, while coverage performances of two types of networks are close.