EECP: An energy efficient coverage preserving protocol for heterogeneous sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed to monitor the environmental conditions of a specific area. In many applications, sensors are required to ensure the proper coverage of entire network area for longer duration. The fuzzy based energy efficient sensor network protocol (FB-EESNP) was developed to provide efficient coverage to entire network area by deploying sensors into various specified regions. The region-wise random node deployment strategy of FB-EESNP ensures efficient coverage as compared to the random node deployment over the entire network field. However, only the node deployment strategy is not sufficient to provide coverage for longer period of time. So in this paper, we propose an energy efficient coverage preserving (EECP) protocol which prolongs the coverage lifespan of the heterogeneous sensor network. We present a novel cluster head selection mechanism to preserve the coverage of various points of interest (POIs) which needs to be monitored continuously. The EECP protocol also proposes an improved hybrid routing concept to achieve better network lifespan by minimizing intra-cluster communication cost of cluster member nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed EECP protocol enhances the coverage and network lifespan both by 98.32% and 42.27% respectively as compared to FB-EESNP.