Adaptive coverage-preserving routing protocol for wireless sensor network

Many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) - including medical healthcare, military surveillance and security systems - must meet the requirement of 100% coverage, but the issue of coverage is not addressed by studies on routing protocols. Thus, this work proposes an adaptive coverage-preserving routing protocol (ACPRP) to deal with coverage. ACPRP can also reduce the possibility that a node with less overlapped coverage is selected as a relay node. Furthermore, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to find optimal weight parameters which are fed into the cluster head selection mechanism and the hierarchy routing selection mechanism proposed by this work. The best transmission route between nodes is calculated based on remaining energy, coverage and transmission distance of each node. In terms of coverage, the simulation results show that the ACPRP is able to provide up to 134%~151% additional service time with 100% coverage, compared to the existing LEACH-Coverage-U protocol and the LEACH protocol, and generate up to 13.4% additional service time with 100% coverage, compared to the ECHR protocol. Therefore, the simulation results demonstrate that the ACPRP is able to provide a better service time for 100% coverage.