A weight-based greedy algorithm for target coverage problem in wireless sensor networks

Recent improvements in affordable and efficient integrated electronic devices have enabled a wide range of applications in the estate of wireless sensor networks. An important issue addressed in wireless sensor networks is the coverage problem. This latter is centered on a fundamental question: how well do the sensors observe the physical space? A major challenge in coverage problem is how to maximize the lifetime of the network while ensuring coverage of a set of targets. To achieve this, the usual process, consists on scheduling sensors activity, which enables energy dissipation control. Scheduling process goes by activating sensors by round such that in each round, only one subset of sensors that satisfies the coverage requirement is activated, while all other sensors are in a low energy mode and will be activated later. In this paper, we propose a weight-based greedy algorithm (WGA) which organizes sensors in multiple subsets. Our objective is to partition an initial set of sensors into a maximum possible number of sensors set covers (SSCs), which can completely monitor targets in a region of interest. Performance evaluation of WGA have proven its efficiency over some well-known algorithms proposed in the literature, in term of computed set covers.