Determining redundant nodes in a location unaware Wireless Sensor Network

Recently Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have garnered a great interest among the research community. WSNs are heavily energy constrained and hence redundant nodes in the network must be allowed to sleep so that the network lifetime may be enhanced. Recently a lot of work has been done to determine the amount of redundancy inherent in a WSN. This paper describes a method that attempts to reduce the redundancy in the network that is distributive in nature and does not use the location information of the nodes. To find out if a node is redundant, the nodes' sensing area overlap is to be found out. The method uses three-circle overlap area as the base case for finding the total overlap over the sensing area of a node by its neighbors. The work here is for static deployment of the sensor nodes.